


Lesser evil

by Malicean



Series: Lesser Evil [1]
Category: Tin Man (2007)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aftermath of Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussed Mercy Killing, Drama, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is worse!, Teeth-Clenched Teamwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-03-07 19:03:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 38,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18879331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malicean/pseuds/Malicean
Summary: Your worst enemy, by definition, does not qualify for being the lesser evil, does he? Though, if there is something to give your nightmares nightmares, you might want to reconsider .... No slash, rated for violence and rare swearing.





	1. Goodnight

**Author's Note:**

> My New Year's resolution for 2019: crosspost my works from FFnet to AO3 at last.
> 
> **Lesser evil** was first posted on FFnet from 2/6/2011 to 2/5/2012.

* * *

Waking up with a pounding headache, to find himself getting dragged along by the arms in an echoing corridor, was really NOT the way he wanted to start his day.

Or night, or whatever, he was a little fuzzy about the time of day, right now. Anyway, the situation didn't improve by getting tossed into a dark cell mere seconds afterwards.

He managed to catch himself in time to kiss the floor with less force than his captors probably intended, but still with more than _he_ liked, thanks to the chains connecting the shackles around his wrists with the ring around his neck.

Instantly rolling back into a ready crouch, regardless, he gave the chains an experimental tug while trying to figure out just _what_ he landed himself into. The corridor had been brightly lit, even glaringly so, so now the shadows shrouding most of the metal-lined room were pitch-black, effectively hiding anything – or any _one_ – outside the sharply delineated shaft of light falling through a grill in the wall above the door. For the time being, the captain of the Royal Guard decided, he would stay near the light.

"Well, well, well. If that isn't Cain's little whelp." No matter what the situation, it always went worse when he heard _that_ voice. Even though it sounded a lot more scratchy than Jeb Cain remembered, he would recognize that evil-grin-turned-sound anywhere.

"Zero!" he hissed. Something rustled in the shadows but his old nemesis did not step, smirkingly, into the light, as he expected.

"You still remember, good. Always knew you had more brains than both of your parents combined."

The young captain straightened up. Just one step closer to the light, just one move that gave away the ex-general's position, and the arrogant bastard was going to get his dues, plus ten annuals' worth of interest. The chains Jeb was wearing were too short to fully straighten his arms, but they left him enough maneuverability to do some real damage, nonetheless. Five annuals as a rebel fighter taught you every dirty trick in the book and quite a few that would never make it into press.

Hot anger swamped the niggling voice at the back of Jeb's head that tried to insist that there was something fundamentally wrong with both the voice and its position relative to the floor.

Maybe a bit of provocation would draw the former Longcoat out. "Flattery will get you nowhere, Zero."

The shadows chuckled, a nasty sound that turned into an even nastier cough.

The niggling voice started yelling. The last time the young captain had heard that sort of wet wheeze, someone had taken a bullet to the lungs. Or the pointy end of a splintered rib. And the scratchiness sounded awfully like vocal cords damaged by screaming for hours and hours on end – and how Jeb wished he didn't know how _that_ sounded. An icy knot was starting to form in his guts, the sort he had learned in his rebel days _not_ to ignore. Something really screwy was going on here.

"Yes, yes," the scratchy voice gave back eventually, "you prefer a more physical form of appreciation, don't you, boy? After all, you always came back for more slaps."

More shuffling in the shadows and the hated face finally leaned into the light, the insufferable smirk firmly in place. Mixed anger and embarrassment almost made the young captain miss how incongruous the expression was.

The ex-general looked beaten up worse than he had in the rebel camp six cycles ago – and no one had pulled their punches then. With eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom, Jeb could make out bare shoulders, a figure lying prone on a sort of bunk, propped up on its elbows.

The sight gave him pause, shortly. _But my, wasn't payback a lovely bitch?_

"Well, well, well," the young captain echoed mockingly. "How times have changed. What happened, Zero? Some of your old buddies found out how you spilled all of the Witch's secrets, at the threat of a spoon?"

To Jeb's immediate disappointment – and half-denied puzzlement – the smirk only widened.

"More like some old buddy of yours, couple of faces looked somewhat familiar. Actually, if not for the cute little necklace you're wearing, I would have sworn this was your little show, boy. Unlike your old man, you have the guts to get your hands dirty if necessary – or should I say, the tastes …?"

That did it. The captain had his hands around the older man's neck too quickly for the latter to block him. The grip wasn't as tight as Jeb would have liked, thanks to the tangle of chains worn by both of them, but the former Longcoat could barely put up a token resistance, anyway, before he started to cough.

Hot, frothy wetness burst through the split lips and spilled over the young captain's hands. Thoroughly disgusted, he dropped the convulsing body to the floor.

Jeb hadn't realized that he had hauled the other man out of the shadows until he saw him flop in the little pool of light like a stranded fish. Absurdly horrified – this was _Zero_ , for Ozma's sake, who richly deserved each and every bad thing that could happen to a human being – the young captain retreated to the furthest wall.

After what felt like an eternity but was probably closer to a minute or two, the ex-general stopped coughing up blood and turned awkwardly towards Jeb. Beside a generous collection of bruises and a number of ugly looking wounds on his bare back – burns, possibly – the older man was also pulling himself along with his arms, dragging useless legs behind.

But the damn smirk was still returning, even on blood-smeared lips and teeth. "Don't like what you see, boy?"

"No. Not as much fun if someone else has beaten you to the punch." _Great pun, captain, really witty_ , the annoying little voice at the back of Jeb's head remarked. Sounding disturbingly like his father, it continued, _isn't it rather that you are too decent a man to find pleasure in the torture of another sentient being, no matter who it is?_

"Palace life has made you soft," the former Longcoat drawled with a sneer, as if in comment to the younger man's conflicting thoughts. "The boy I stuffed into the iron suit would have thrown himself at any willing guard out there, just to get a look at this."

This time, Jeb caught himself halfway through the lunge, just close enough to recognize the triumph, followed by desperate disappointment, in the older man's eyes.

The young captain drew back. This was actually an odd form of suicide by cop, he realized with a chill. He had seen enough lung shots – and so must have the former general – to know that the man was dying anyway, unless he got very fast and very hefty medical attention.

_So why the desperate hurry?_ The icy knot in Jeb's guts tightened further. He almost missed the next verbal barb.

"Oh, come on, boy. Can't fault a man for expecting a child to come after his mother. And the Missus Cain was very eager to please, in exchange for …"

Fingers clenched into the chains just under the neck ring, the young captain pulled the ex-Longcoat close to his face. "Wrong answer, Zero. You are going to drown, in your own blood, slowly and painfully, and I'm not even going near you," he paused for emphasis, gratified to no end to see the damnable smirk slip at last, "until you beg me to!"

Dropping the chains, Jeb wiped his hands on his pants and stalked back to the opposite corner. Turning to sit against the wall, he found the other man staring after him with an oddly frozen expression, before turning over and dragging himself back into the shadows.

The young captain watched the ex-general's slow progression to the metal bunk, watched him struggle to get his arms on top of the knee-high ledge – the chain between his wrists was shorter than that and the crippled man couldn't keep his torso upright without at least one arm bracing it – and tried to ignore the mix of strangled gasps and soft keening noises that went with the efforts. With head and shoulders finally atop the bunk, Zero simply let his head slump between his hands, trying to catch his breath back – a task not helped by his awkward position.

When the wet rasps became worse over the course of several minutes and the former Longcoat made no move to get up further – wasn't able to, by the looks of it – Jeb decided that he couldn't stand the watching any longer.

Three quick steps brought him on top of the semiconscious man, reaching down to grab him under the armpits. The chain between the young captain's wrists was shorter than was practical for that, it would dig deep into the injured back for a moment, but he would get the man onto the bunk and stop the ugly sounds.

That was all he intended, Jeb told himself, to put an end to the irritating noise.

The actual results of his actions were somewhat unexpected. The moment he tried to get a grip on the sweat-, blood-, whatever-slickened body, it reared back, trying to twist away with feeble but desperate movements.

"No, no, no, no, no," the man was begging, he was sobbing with fright, and the young captain had to fight down his nausea at the terror in the choking voice.

He managed to lift the ex-general in top of the bunk despite the latter's best efforts to pull away, and then stumbled away, feeling thoroughly sick. Jeb had always taken pride in being feared by the Longcoats in his days as a rebel leader, but _this_ tone made him feel like a monster beyond the Witch's wildest dreams. Even if he couldn't, for the life of him, discern what he had done to incite such terror.

Except … perhaps _he_ hadn't. The young captain wasn't sure if the older man had been conscious enough to recognize just who had come to grab him. The thought did _nothing_ to alleviate Jeb's nausea.

Looking back, he found the other man as he had dropped him, flat on his belly and face buried between his shackled arms.

The young captain pushed off the wall, suddenly tired of everything. First sorting out the dangling legs of the former Longcoat, to straighten the limp body up, he then dropped onto the head end of the bunk, too.

The broken form flinched as his weight came down, so close, then slumped again, defeated. The silence stretched, punctuated only by harsh but more regular breaths.

"When did they break your back?" Jeb asked abruptly, not really expecting an answer. He hadn't seen anyone with a broken back, yet, that had survived the next few moments, but somehow he had expected the same sort of swelling and bruising to appear as with any other broken bone.

He almost failed to hear the hoarse, muffled words. "Not broken. Shock-stick to the spine, it'll wear off in a few hours."

The smirk was gone, utterly, from the tone, and somehow Jeb missed it.

"That works?" Damn, if they had known that earlier, the rebels could have made tons of prisoners at the Witch's Tower. Just disarm the Alchemists and then ….

_No, wouldn't have worked._ They hadn't had the strength of troops then, to guard so many prisoners. Nor the inclination to take them.

"Yeah. Just, don't touch the back of the neck if you want people to talk afterwards. That can fry the brain." This wasn't panicking Zero eager to talk, as it had been in the woods half an annual ago – though Jeb had later wondered how much of _that_ had been an act[1]. _This_ was toneless, answering a question because a question had been asked. It sent shivers down the young captain's spine.

But there was something he couldn't let hang up in the air. "My mother …" Jeb trailed off, not really wanting to know.

The buried head shifted, pale eyes looking up at him. "… was far too desperate and angry to even think of offering herself to me. Wouldn't have taken her up on it, anyway. I have some pride left."

There was a pregnant pause, but in his breath-taking relief, the young captain almost failed to notice it. "Or had. Please, kill me. Please, before they sic their Viewer on me and start all over again."

Jeb gave a start. Just when he thought the situation couldn't get any more nauseating …. "What sort of Viewer would …?" _But of course,_ "… same as would help the Sorceress. A very scared one."

"More like barking mad, in this case. But please, I'm begging you …"

At his most vengeful, the young captain had dreamed of this, considered it the most lovely vision known to man. Now he grabbed the other man's shoulder, regardless of how much that was likely to hurt, in his haste to stop him.

"Don't!" Jeb choked out. Then he drew a deep breath and thought of Tik-Tok, the nervous young bay that had somehow managed to impale itself on a broken tree limb, many annuals ago, and the grim look on his father's face when he had unholstered his gun. _Goodnight, Tik-Tok_ , the elder Cain had said soothingly, before pulling the trigger.

"Goodnight, Zero," the young captain said, bringing the heavy steel manacles down on the sandy-haired head.

Eager to get things over with before the former Longcoat regained consciousness, Jeb crossed his arms, slipped the chain between his wrists underneath the ex-general's chin and uncrossed his arms. The chain bit into the unprotected throat – and the world exploded into fireworks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] After all, the Longcoat general had sent them right into the heart of the Witch's fortress, with most of her troops gathered around and an Emerald _and_ Double Eclipse empowered Witch on top, just moments after he had learned that he couldn't be caught at duplicity thanks to the Witch's protection. By all rights, it should have been a massacre – and _not_ the way it had turned out to be.
> 
> * * *
> 
> A/N: The diagnosis as given by Jeb Cain may not be technically correct, but the young man is no more a medical man than I am. And in a world where you can remove the better part of a man's forebrain and still have him talk in coherent, if occasionally repetitive, sentences, the human body obviously works a bit different than on the Otherside.


	2. As told

Waking up with a pounding headache for the second time on this day, Captain Jeb Cain felt reasonably cross with whoever was in charge of things around here. At the very least, they should have shut up whatever creature was currently howling at the moon, the noise was killing him.

_Howling. Moon. Lunatic. Barking mad._

It took his rattled brain a few false starts to come up with that train of associations, but then the young captain was wide awake, headache forgotten in the sudden rush of adrenaline.

Wide awake, in a loose heap of limbs on the floor, and with the chain between his wrists secured to a solid looking ring in the floor to keep him from rising beyond a low crouch.

The howling creature in question was indeed covered in matted fur, wore a metal collar and was currently digging its paws into the back of a limp, sandy-haired body, stretched out on a metal table before it.

_Damn._ Jeb had honestly meant to spare the former Longcoat, nasty bastard though he was, that sort of fate.

"I should thank you, young man, for assisting in the task of breaking subject Z," a soft, oddly precise voice said, right behind him.

_Still somewhat out of it_ , the young captain noted to himself, usually people didn't manage to sneak up on him so easily. He leaned sidewise against the chain, subtly testing the strength of the fixture while gaining the purchase necessary to turn far enough to get a look at the speaker.

Middle-aged, pale, bald and a creepy way of looking right through the people he was talking to.

Creepy continued to speak, in a detachedly pleasant tone. "Now that his last hope for release has been proven futile, the rest of the conversion will proceed without impediment, I expect."

Perhaps it was the double hit on the head, but Jeb really couldn't stop himself from asking, "What conversion?"

He found two watery eyes focus on him with a pensive expression. "Why, the conversion into the perfect soldier, of course. He has a high natural aggression, it simple needs to be harnessed properly."

_Already happened, they call it boot camp, nowadays_ , the captain almost threw back, but this time he caught himself in time. The unnerving stare was a great help, every instinct in Jeb's body was screaming how he did _not_ need that sort of attention.

"You should have much potential, too, I believe," Creepy continued, his expression turning from thoughtful to appraising. "I … Stop that! Stop that immediately, that's overloading him!"

_Saved by the commotion._ The young captain blew out a breath and tried to will his pulse down from racing. Creepy getting focused beat Zero armed and armored, from a ten-annual-old's perspective, hands down for scariness. Creepy looked at people and saw … something else. What exactly, Jeb had _NO_ intention to find out. He _had_ to get out of here.

And … he had to throw a monkey wrench into this conversion plan. Apart from the fact that it turned his stomach to leave anybody, _no matter who_ , in Creepy's clutches, Zero had been deadly enough before, there was no need to perfect that. With that plan of action established, the young captain looked up to find out what had drawn the pale man away.

Two other pale guys had hooked metal poles into the crazy Viewer's collar and were dragging the lion-man away, while Creepy stared disapprovingly at a convulsing Zero. While Jeb was watching, the metal table stopped rattling, the convulsions slowly ebbed away and finally stopped altogether.

Creepy still didn't look happy. He snapped his fingers at a line of not-quite-right looking, hulking figures. "Take them back. We'll have to wait for the influence to recede before it is possible to initiate the next stage."

_Whatever that was supposed to mean_. The young captain was thanking every entity that might be listening that he wasn't about to find out.

_Yet._ Which made getting out an even more urgent objective.

Jeb eyed the two silent pieces of brawn that came to fetch him speculatively. Expressionless faces, movements both powerful and just this side of jerky, and – as a pair – moving far too synchronized for anything not tik-tok. They seemed to know his state of mind, nevertheless. By way of greeting, they jabbed a shock stick at his lower back.

Not really in the mood to appreciate the irony, Captain Cain was nonetheless extremely grateful for the ex-general's warning. He managed to twist his spine away from the impact at the last moment.

Then he screamed. Jeb had been on the wrong end of shock sticks before, but this one was definitely a souped-up version. His back felt on fire, but when he got his breath back and found himself suspended – once again, he was _really_ getting tired of repetitions – between the two Tik-Tok goons marching in step with uncanny precision, there was some control left in his legs. Carefully keeping his trailing legs limp, he twisted his head back and found two identical goons dragging the unconscious man some way behind them.

It was now or never, then. Somehow the young captain doubted that Creepy would have both of them placed in the same cell, again.

So, at the slightest distraction – or otherwise round that next bend in the corridor that would take the following pair of guards out of sight for a few moments – he would kick that knee – slightly favored, a weak spot, be it flesh and bone or clockwork – slip out of the falling grip, duck that shock stick, grab it, push it into the other goon, if the dodge had not already accomplished that, twist it and take out the original wielder. Two hard hits to the back of the neck – Jeb had no intention to talk with these guys – and then he could see about finishing the job he had been asked to do.

One last look over his shoulder. Just in time to see the former Longcoat go from rag-doll to demon, pulling his legs up to his chest to kick out two knees at once, grab a knife – why had Jeb's guards no knives, that was unfair! – bury the blade to the hilt into its owner's belly and yank it up, twist it out – the ensuing gush of red settled the question of flesh and bone versus clockwork rather finally – stab the other and catch the shock stick falling down towards him. Impressive for a man the young captain had previously seen only preying on weaker targets.

The two goons had died almost noiselessly, yet one of Jeb's guards must have noticed something, nodding mutely at his partner to stop and started to turn. This being an excellent distraction, the young captain set his own plan into motion. It worked out perfectly, up to the point where the second shocked guard, outweighing Jeb by half, at least, collapsed while still holding a death-grip on his arm. Before he could untangle himself, the young captain found a blood-spattered ex-Longcoat general, a shock stick in one hand, a red-smeared knife in the other, standing over him with an unreadable expression on his face.

For a moment, every nightmare of Jeb's youth seemed to have coalesced into flesh.

"I think I owe you a life, boy," the ominous figure said, in a voice much smoother than before. Then the tell-tale smirk slipped back into place and the young captain felt ridiculously relieved to see it.

"Now get up, boy, check yours for keys. And then we need to get these bodies off the corridor before somebody finds them, or we'll never make it out of here."

That was a general talking and the captain in him wanted to jump to obey. The rebel wanted to shoot the general but had to admit that the plan was sound. And Jeb Cain was caught between gaping and gagging at the thought of a _'we'_ that included both him and his old nemesis.

All in all, he did as told.


	3. Credibility

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Asymmetric warfare is, by its very definition, unfair. So, whenever a regular army takes on a nebulous force of _'rebels'_ (or whatever the buzzword of the day and place might be), _ugly things are going to happen!_ A few years into the conflict, it doesn't really matter which side started with the nasty stuff. I could cite pretty much the entirety of human history as precedent here, and since people seem to be people even in the O.Z., I doubt things happen much differently there.

* * *

One of Jeb Cain's late guards wore the bunch of keys that had released him from the ring in the floor earlier, and which also contained the key for his shackles – and those worn by the former Longcoat.

After piling the bodies into an empty cell nearby, Zero started to methodically strip one of the dead men. After blinking for a moment, Jeb saw the obvious reasons for that sort of behavior and went to stand guard at the door, resolutely ignoring the way his skin crawled at turning his back at the ex-Longcoat general.

"Here, put those over your clothes," said general commanded a minute or two later, dropping a bundle of cloth beside him. "You don't have the bulk to fill them out properly."

 _Who died and left **you** in charge?!_ the young captain thought rebelliously, but then quickly decided not to follow that particular train of thought any further. Plenty of bodies lay that way. He pulled the nondescript tunic over his head.

Dressed in drab grey to a superficial semblance of the local goons, he turned towards Zero, standing watch in turn. The other man was quicker. "You know how to get out of here?"

Jeb shook his head, "Been unconscious 'til almost right in front of the cell. I don't even know where _'here'_ is. Last thing I remember is a road near Finaqua."

"Hm. Same here, more or less. Then we'll just have to ask for the way."

For a man who usually moved as if he owned the place, the ex-general was scarily good at the stiff, Tik-Tok-Man-like marching step of the expressionless goons. Falling in step with him – a skill hard-won in the last few cycles – they passed unnoticed by a handful of goons and then, finally, a more lively looking man. Zero walked unblinkingly past the latter, threw one look over his shoulder to make sure no witnesses were in sight, and then whirled the man through the door said man had just unlocked and slammed him hard against the wall.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the former Longcoat drawled, with the cruel pleasure on his face that had haunted Jeb's nightmares for most of his teenage annuals. "I'm General Zero, commanding officer of the late Sorceress's armed forces … I see you have heard of me."

What little color the man's face had held drained away, and the wicked grin widened. "I'll make this easy for you: you either talk to me, or to him."

The ex-general nodded towards the young man keeping an eye on the corridor outside, before continuing in a conspiratorial tone, "I'm sure, you know my reputation – but I've seen a couple of the bodies left after _he_ caught a patrol, so you better believe me that he may not have that much experience, but he certainly has imagination."

The pale man talked. Very rapidly.

"I can't believe you tried to play _'Bad tin man, worse tin_ _man'_ and handed _me_ 'worse'," Jeb growled under his breath, once the body had been adequately hidden.

Zero, currently preoccupied with scanning the corridor outside for potential threats, seemed less than impressed.

"Huh?" he said vaguely.

" _I saw the bodies_ ," the young captain imitated the older man's tone sarcastically. "That sounded as if _you_ 'd been impressed."

The ex-general grinned, darkly amused. "No need to be shy, boy. Your little habit of gutting people alive almost offset the Realm of the Unwanted _and_ the distance from the Sorceress as advantages of a southern posting."

 _Wait, what?_ "I never …"

A nasty chuckle. "What's the matter, boy? Afraid the Queen might take it badly if she hears that one of her officers has a history of nailing mutilated men to wayside trees? Daddy probably won't like it, either, huh?"

 _Ha ha, Longcoat humor, I get it_.

Faced with Jeb's furious lack of amusement, the ex-general rolled his eyes. "What? Think your old man would take _my_ word over yours?"

 _Talk about a joke gone too far._ "I. Never. Nailed …" the young captain started, through clenched teeth.

Zero merely slapped his back dismissively. "Oh, stop justifying yourself. It's not like I'm the one to talk. Hell, a couple of prisoners I made ended up with the Alchemists …"

The former Longcoat stopped as if he'd walked into a wall.

"Fuck," he said emphatically. "Alchemists. They are Alchemists."

 _Huh?_ Thrown by the sudden sidetrack, Jeb took a moment to react.

"Yeah, I figured that one out," he replied acidly, "as soon as Creepy guy used _'conversion'_ on people the way Glitch talks about spare parts."

"What did he say?" The ex-general turned to him with such murderous focus in his eyes that the former rebel almost buried his knife in the other man's guts by reflex when he was grabbed by the shoulder.

 _Huh, indeed_. "You don't know?"

"No, somehow I missed out on the introductory tour," Zero growled. "So. What. Did. He. Say?!"

Somewhat unnerved by the sudden intensity, Jeb repeated what little Creepy had said about his plans, which seemed to mean a lot more to the former Longcoat general than it had to him – and not in a good way.

"We have to stop them," the older man said, with deadly finality in his voice.

"What?" Not that Jeb disagreed, actually, but _Zero_ insisting on taking out the bad guys? That was out of character, even in a situation that was a bizarre nightmare any which way you turned it.

"Listen up, boy!" the ex-general hissed venomously, then took what had to be a calming breath since his tone was approaching rationality afterwards. "I'm a killer and I like my job. I bet I'm your family's personal nightmare turned flesh, and I still wasn't the worst the Longcoats had to offer. But some of the things that the Alchemists did in the lower levels of the Sorceress's Tower, turned _every_ Longcoat's stomach!"

That was … descriptive. _Ugh._

They marched down the next corridor in silence, each man lost in his morbid thoughts. But there was an accusation Jeb could not let slide so easily.

"When we made prisoners, we beat them up 'til they talked," which rarely took long, and vague threats left to imagination did most of the job … the young captain really didn't want to think about _why_ that might have worked so well. "Then they were shot – or maybe had their throats cut, quick death either way."

 _No justification necessary, war was war._ But, "No one was ever gutted alive while I was there. And we never left any bodies where they could be found, that would have brought another patrol either down on our heads or on some innocent party's. We buried them."

It took another ten steps before the former Longcoat replied. "Well, I _did_ see the bodies. If you didn't kill them, somebody else did."

 _While we got the blame_ , Jeb thought angrily. And the people all around paid the price, their villages burned down by Longcoats who might have actually been provoked, occasionally, if the ex-general was talking the truth. What a fucking mess!

They reconfirmed the most convenient way towards the exit as soon as feasible, and this time the icy fury in Jeb's eyes lent extra credibility to Zero's oblique threats.


	4. Alternative

Sneaking through the underground compound with the ex-general at his side was a dance on the razor's edge, Jeb Cain found.

As long as he was only peripherally aware of the other man, the former Longcoat might have been any of the older rebels with military experience that the young captain had worked with before. Someone moving in a certain way that subconscious routines identified as a fighter who could hold his own in most confrontations and – even more importantly – someone who could be trusted to spot any threats approaching on his side, meaning that Jeb only had to worry about half of the environment.

As long as he kept the train of events that had put him in this situation at the forefront of his mind, he could cope, too. But every time he caught sight of the other man's profile unexpectedly, or, worse, heard his voice when Zero commented on something under his breath, the young captain had to clamp down on a sort of reverse flinch. Not flight but purely fight response.

Not that the latter happened very often. The expressionless goons were silent to the point of muteness – making Jeb wonder if the quartet they had taken down at the beginning had died so quietly simply because they were unable to give tongue, at all – and so, in order to impersonate a pair of those, they had to stay silent, too. At least, as long as there were other people within hearing, and in the echoing tunnels of the converted mine, every noise carried quite far.

Like now, for example. Several sets of footsteps and more than one voice heralded a larger group, approaching from a tunnel perpendicular to the one they were just marching down.

The young captain threw a sidelong glance at the ex-general, trying to make out if the man felt like trying their flimsy disguise on so many people at once – not that he liked to follow the other man's lead, but Zero _had_ spent more time down here and therefore should know a bit more about the locals.

Instead, Jeb watched the older man grow pale to the point where his faded grey tunic held a more healthy color.

A moment later recognition set in, and when the former Longcoat veered off sharply, to almost stagger through the nearest door, the young captain stayed right at the older man's heels. Meeting Creepy _once_ had already been too often.

As soon as Jeb was sure that (a) their sudden move had not created a noticeable disturbance in the corridor outside, and (b) Zero wasn't going into shock on him, the young man tried to determine what sort of room they had walked into, this time.

At first glance, he had assumed that they had stumbled into some kind of storage room: a long, low, gloomy hallway, walls lined with tightly packed shelves.

On a second look, however, he wished the first impression hadn't been so close to the truth.

It was just, the things were called _bunks_ , not _shelves_ , when you put people on them. Even when they were stacked up like so much firewood. Silent people, motionless people, that showed absolutely no reaction to their sudden entrance.

Skin crawling with apprehension, the young captain took a closer look.

"Are they alive?" The ex-general was leaning against the wall behind him like it was the only thing holding him upright, but his question was as sharp as anything.

"They breathe," more couldn't be said about them in good conscience. Further on, there seemed to be some with open eyes, but Jeb didn't feel like investigating things any closer.

"Hm." The former Longcoat frowned. "Recognize someone?" was the next sharp question.

_Recognize?!_ But on second thought, the man had a point. Just because the last thing Jeb remembered had him returning from a scouting ride alone, didn't mean that the Alchemists had never nabbed anyone he knew. Swallowing heavily, he set out to scan the silent rows as far as the poor light allowed.

It was a measure of the room's uncanniness that he actually felt _safer_ when he heard Zero push off the wall and come up behind him.

When the sickly glow emanating from a lamp set in the wall above the entrance had finally run out, the young man had still found nothing that looked familiar.

"No one's here that I know." Jeb didn't bother to hide his relief.

"Anyone y…" he started to ask, before a sudden tackle drove him to the floor, a hard hand clamped over his mouth.

The creak of the door opening stilled his struggles. Light flooded in, from the well-lit corridor outside, but for the figure silhouetted in the opening the shadows around their position were still impenetrable.

"You, you, you, you. Up!" an imperious voice demanded, and four silent figures rose in unison from the first row of bunks.

"Follow me!" was the next order, thrown over the shoulder as the intruder turned on his heel and marched out, the four newly roused goons trailing obediently behind him.

The door clanked closed behind them, and the young captain silently counted to fifty, to make sure there would be no sudden return. He had barely made it to twenty, when a soft rustling put him on high alert.

All along the gloomy hallway, the still forms started to move.

Without conscious thought, he found himself back-to-back with the ex-general, weapons ready, and backing towards the door as fast as possible.

In the better lit part of the storeroom – no point in calling it otherwise – Jeb could make out a wave-like motion running through the rows of bunks, every single occupant of them creeping a bit sideways – without bothering to turn over from lying on their backs – one after the other. Then again. And again.

By the time the they had reached the door, the vacancies left by the four summoned goons had vanished without a trace, and with those gaps refilled, the silent figures resumed their inhuman stillness, the rustling receding towards the gloomy end of the hallway and then dying away.

Neither of the two men cared whether the corridor outside was clear.

Leaning against the solid wood of the door, heart racing as if he'd run a hundred times the distance he had just hurried down, Jeb Cain took a deep breath and turned towards the man beside him.

"What you asked for before – if _this,_ " a flick of his knife towards the hallway stretching beyond the door behind them, "is the alternative, I want the same."

Face a white mask in the glaring light, Zero nodded grimly. He gripped Jeb's proffered hand so hard it hurt.


	5. Cage

Jeb Cain mistrusted things that went too easy.

He could have done, nevertheless, without the massive metal wall before them, blocking any further progress along the tunnel they were traveling in. The tunnel that should have led right to the main shaft of the converted, depleted moritarium mine according to all directions, even if none of their involuntary informants had personally used this – somewhat roundabout – route before. Even the free-willed dwellers of the subterranean compound didn't get much out, it seemed, and if they did, they used the main access tunnel – which in turn would have been less than opportune to use for thinly-disguised escapees.

Jeb could have done, too, without the shrill shriek of an alarm siren starting to wail behind them. The former rebel did not even blink at the sudden noise, but he was mildly surprised to find the ex-general also marching on without a visible reaction. Six cycles as the most wanted man in the realm had taught the former Longcoat something about not behaving like a fugitive, the young captain assumed. Or possibly, he conceded grudgingly, Zero had long known what sort of behavior triggered a chase reflex, seeing how the older man had been hunting rebels for longer than Jeb had been dodging Longcoats.

_Damn. And now I know how the bastard_ stayed _the most wanted man in the realm for half an annual._

The sudden insight wasn't very helpful in the current situation, though, and so the young captain refocused his attention on the obstacle before them. At least, the lack of traffic hereabouts made sure that nobody would get suspicious, should an unflinching walk into a dead-end tunnel during a general alarm be atypical behavior for the local goons. The two men kept on walking, both unwilling to turn back. Something about the reinforced metal construction reminded the young captain of a large floodgate, so perhaps the thing wasn't as unmovable as it seemed ...

They were within some twenty steps of the wall before a narrow strip of clear space became visible, running along the length of the wall and connecting half a dozen tunnels fanning out along the formation of the original veins of ore. It would have been just wide enough for two men to walk abreast, if not for the massive support beams jutting out from the wall every few meters. No kind of door – or opening mechanism – was immediately visible.

By unspoken agreement, they followed the narrow throughway far enough to be out of sight for anyone approaching along the tunnel they had come from, and tucked themselves between a pair of girders that would hide them even from passersby along the wall.

There Zero kicked the metal resoundingly, cursing the men who had given them directions low but vindictively. Somewhat impressed by the vocabulary – and quickly sobered, as soon as he remembered that the older man was very much capable of doing at least the physically possible parts of the tirade to a person for real, if given the opportunity – Jeb listened with one ear to the rant, but kept the other – and both eyes – open for possible threats.

Against the backdrop of the howling sirens, he saw the pair of armed goons emerge from a tunnel further on, but didn't hear them. An elbow to the ribs silenced the former Longcoat quite satisfyingly. Together they watched the goons move along the passage to a point about halfway across the length of the metal wall and take positions half hidden between two support beams.

The two men shared a look, and turned down the narrow throughway, once more.

Zero had taken point, and while Jeb had started one step behind him, he was now unobtrusively hanging back, slowly increasing the distance to the point where it equaled the distance between the two goons. One sharp left turn and then .…

The ex-general had just passed the first guardian when the empty eyes suddenly focused, and without further warning, blades were coming down on him. Zero dodged one of them and blocked the second slash with his left arm, and it wasn't until Jeb heard him grunt with pain under the impact that he appreciated what a stupid move that was – for an unarmored man. Taking on the nearer goon kept the young captain occupied enough to preclude further musings for the next moments, but then Jeb realized that he had never seen the former Longcoat without full armor on his left arm, not until he had stripped him, himself. Obviously, the ex-general had also gotten so used to wearing armor that it had become part of his reflexive responses. Not that Zero had let the painful hit incapacitate him, he had followed up on the block with a quick jab of his own, that left the attacking goon in a weakly gurgling heap.

Now that Jeb's opponent was safely dispatched, he watched the former Longcoat use teeth and his right hand to tear the slit sleeve open to the wrist, to get a good look at the deep gash. The way the older man suddenly straightened his arm with a choked noise, as if to place the injured limb as far away from his body as possible, filled the young captain with dread. Stepping over, he grabbed the bloodied wrist to get a good look, himself. Then he dropped it, as if it were red-hot.

Under the rapidly congealing blood, slashed flesh was knitting itself back together, almost as quickly as under a healer's touch.

Jeb caught a glimpse of the other man's eyes and quickly looked away. The older man had the eyes of a man who has just realized that cutting his own throat would probably hurt, but do nothing to diminish his chances of turning into something as yet unspecified but definitely inhuman.

To think that a number Alchemists had escaped from the Witch's Tower because everyone had taken the Longcoats for the more serious threat – maybe even Creepy himself. _Creepy .…_

_We'll have to wait for the influence to recede_ , the alchemist's enigmatic words came back to the young captain, a follow-up to _that's overloading him._ Could a body actually get an overdose of healing powers – and store the surplus, becoming self-healing, at least for a while? And if so, at what cost?

_Costs be damned_. "It's not permanent!" Jeb sincerely hoped, for various reasons, that he was right on this. "Zero, hey, Zero!"

No reaction.

For a moment, the young man cursed the childish revulsion that had kept him from looking deep enough into his archenemy's file to know the older man's given name – monsters had no need for something as human – and therefore left him without an appellation that might have reached the former Longcoat even in his current state – a state so much on edge that you could shave with it. Somewhere the fates were really laughing at him, Jeb Cain concluded.

Deprived of that alternative, he reached out and slapped the older man, hard. Then he jumped back when the former Longcoat reacted – predictably – violent.

The young captain grinned, half in relief, half because he was feeling the sweet taste of payback on his lips, concerning that nasty episode about dead men on trees.

"Now that I have your attention," he drawled, "according to Creepy you got an _'overload'_ from that mad Viewer. But, and that's the important part, _'the influence will recede',_ if you wait for a while."

The former Longcoat general growled something anatomically impossible involving both Creepy _and_ Jeb, in a tone that wiped the grin straight off the younger man's face. But then he turned abruptly towards the hatch-like door set into the wall, which the dead goons had been guarding, and the young captain decided to let it slide.

The hatch turned out to be the first door of an airlock-like structure – very handy to store two bodies out of sight – and what little noise the metal sliding across metal made when the second door was cautiously pushed open, was swallowed by the din beyond the wall.

Beyond it yawned the wide cavern at the floor of the main shaft, lined all around with the same strong metal walls. Bright lights illuminated the elevator in its safety cage on one side, and the full dozen of guards aligned at the mouth of the main access tunnel of the mine on the opposite side.

But those were a good quarter of the way around the wide hall.


	6. Cursebreaker

Jeb Cain had, hitherto, considered himself a patient man.

One that could wait, without fidgeting, for a patrol to walk right into an ambush, even if that meant to keep still for hours in an icy, drizzling rain. Also, the top of the large elevator cage was far from the most uncomfortable place where he'd ever been forced to lie low for a while. The tightly woven grids of the safety cage and, especially, the battery of blindingly bright lights attached to it, hid him from onlookers; and with the constant _chug-chug-chug_ of a heavy engine running nearby – a pump that kept the mineshaft from flooding, or possibly even the machine that moved the elevator, currently idling on standby – he could have even moved around a bit, or spoken normally, without anyone hearing him.

It was therefore, without a doubt, the fault of the other person he had to share the cramped space with, that _this_ wait was driving Jeb up the walls. Quite literally. The young captain turned over on his back, to stare past the hoist cables snaking up into the darkness towards the tiny spark of light at the top of the quarter-mile deep shaft, feeling a growing urge to scale the walls without the aid of the elevator.

It was the smirk, mostly. Jeb had come to the conclusion that it was simply the other man's default facial expression, and – as much as the thought disturbed him – had even begun to recognize several different ones. There was an aggressive smirk, a satisfied smirk – at least as dangerous as the first – even the faint smirk Zero would eventually fall back into when halfway relaxed, and which was possibly not even consciously meant to express a feeling of innate superiority to anyone else around. It still drove the younger man crazy.

He debated saying something, _anything,_ to break the tension crawling up his nerves, but quickly dismissed the idea. It wasn't like they shared any common interests that could be used to strike up an idle conversation. _So, stuffed anyone into an iron suit, lately? Oh no, not recently, I'm trying to break that habit, but thanks for asking, anyway. What about you?_ Yeah, that would go over _really_ well.

But speaking of iron suits ….

"How long did it take for your men to find you?" It had taken a bit over a week until the situation was secure enough to spare a few men for retrieval. By then, to Jeb's enormous frustration, the suit had already been empty.

The former Longcoat turned to him with a grin that was mainly teeth. "Oh, they weren't any of mine," he purred, softly, "they were yours."

Hairs rising at the back of his neck, the young captain turned fully towards the other man. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what I said. They knew where to find me and they strongly believed that a hanging was _way_ too good for me." The grin receded until only the teeth remained. "Word of advice, boy: just because a prisoner isn't able to stand on his own, it doesn't mean he's secured. And you always make sure your prisoners are secured _before_ you tell them what you have in mind for them. Anything else is just asking for trouble."

The ex-general was holding eye contact with a predatory stare, daring the younger man to look away first, but Jeb felt no need to back down just because some of his former compatriots had taken retribution to a drastic – and, obviously, deadly for them – level. Zero had, after all, come by their hatred honestly.

Faced with his unyielding demeanor, the former Longcoat let the grin resurface. "Well, of course, the curse came handy, too."

_Huh?_ "What curse?"

The ex-general opened his mouth to reply, did a double take and started laughing. "You have no real idea how the suits work, do you, boy?"

"Oh, excuse me for not being an Alchemist," the young captain snapped back, stung by the implied lack of education. "Or an engineer, or whatever it takes to make the damned things!"

"A Sorceress," the former Longcoat said softly, caught himself and went back to his insufferably superior tone. "Or rather, all of the above. An Alchemist for the preservative vapors, an engineer for the mechanics of the suit, and the Sorceress to seal the curse. The one set into the suit, that says _'You must not die!'_ "

Jeb stared at the older man in clear disbelief, causing the latter to roll his eyes. "Oh, come on! You didn't think it was just the mechanics of the suit that keeps people alive for years, did you? The vapors need a few days to put the body into stasis, …"

Oh yeah, Jeb remembered those days, vividly. _Suffocating, parched with thirst, starving_ – he pushed the memories away, forcefully, just in time to catch up with the rest of the speech.

"But even that isn't perfect and then there's still hypothermia, heatstroke or all the other things that ought to kill a man if you put him into a sealed iron coffin exposed to the elements. So, that's where the curse comes in, nothing can kill you inside the suits, and once outside, you're damn hard to kill, too, for a while, depending on how long the curse has had time to soak into your bones."

The former Longcoat looked pensive for a moment. "I've heard some pretty wild stories about the adventures the younger Princess had to go through before … the Eclipse."

Jeb filed the minute pause before _the Eclipse_ away for further reference but decided to ignore it for the moment.

"But some rather unlikely details about your old man's exploits actually make more sense than the rest," Zero went on. "Running after taking a Papay bite to the leg, for example, that shouldn't have worked, normally, and you know that. Or taking a fall down the Northern Palace, _through_ the ice of the lake, and still making it to the shore afterwards."

_Some curse_ , Jeb thought, feeling stunned, but he didn't question the choice of words. Not being able to die was _not_ a blessing.

The ex-general gave him a look that was entirely too knowing for the young captain's tastes, but didn't comment. Instead he added, in a very dry tone, "A bullet through the heart still would have killed him, though, if not for that _lucky charm in his pocket,_ whatever that was, which caught the bullet."

Jeb felt no need to elaborate, and Zero shrugged it off. He gave the younger man a once-over that made the captain's skin crawl. "Anyway, if _you_ broke into more than a couple of suits, you'd better talk with the Crown Princess, about what happens to a cursebreaker who has no idea what he's doing."

" _What_ happens to a cursebreaker?" Jeb ground out, despite himself.

The former Longcoat smirked and shrugged.

"Do I look like a Light-user to you?" he asked rhetorically, then gave a vague wave. "Something really nasty, that's all I know."


	7. Road

* * *

This had once been a large natural cave, Jeb Cain concluded.

The massive wheels that the hoist cables of the main elevator were running over were set into solid rock, and if one looked closely – not much of a problem, seeing how the space between the roof of the elevator and the ceiling of the cave was barely high enough for him to stand upright – the ancient marks of pickaxes and other excavation tools were still visible. The young man could imagine how, at one point in history, the first prospectors had stumbled upon the cave and found a vein of glittering moritanium ore rising from the deep at the back of it.

Some time after the shaft had been sunk deeper and deeper into the ground, someone had walled off most of the original mouth of the cave, setting a very solid looking gate into the remaining opening, and filled the enclosed space with workshops and offices.

And stables. Less than twenty yards away, two dozen solidly built horses were munching placidly on hay, while another two were currently getting rubbed down by two goons in preparation for saddling them. Two chatting Alchemists were stood idly nearby.

It had taken hours, four or five increasingly tense hours, before the taller of the gossiping Alchemists had arrived at the bottom of the main shaft with a retinue of two assistants and nearly a dozen goons, which he'd promptly all dismissed before entering the elevator and slowly rising to the surface – or as near as one got in this cave. Once upside, the pale man had snapped at the row of goons aligned beside the massive gate to prepare the horses, and the Alchemist in charge of said goons had hurriedly sidled up and started to make idle conversation.

Simultaneously finished with the horses, one of the two goons proceeded to prepare a third one, while his double walked off towards the back of the cave and disappeared into a room at the end of the row of horse boxes.

Another man in grey followed him in.

For the Alchemists one grey-clad, expressionless goon was as good as the other, and so no one noticed if the man returning with the horse tack wasn't the same as the one who had gone for it.

Neatly arranging saddle and headgear on the beam set up to this purpose, Jeb turned smartly and walked back towards the back of the stable, but then veered off sharply into a horsebox before he reached the tack room. While he made friendly with the horses in the process of crawling through their feed, the second set of tack was nonetheless delivered and so was the third.

The horses were somewhat more lively than the goons, but the one that was currently getting its hooves checked merely snorted softly when the grey-clad figure bent over its leg was suddenly ambushed by another of its kind. The latter had just previously offered the horse a handful of oats, and so he was trusted enough that the animal didn't stir further at the smell of blood or a body quickly getting shoved beneath its bedding against the wall.

Between the two of them, the young captain and the ex-general saddled three horses and led them out into the free lane leading towards the gate. Jeb carefully kept his face unmoving – and turned towards the nearest of the two horses he was holding – while Zero, with a just as carefully blank face, helped the tall Alchemist into the saddle. Then the former Longcoat mounted himself, his movements perfectly in tandem with the younger man if Jeb said so himself.

At another snapped order from the Alchemist, the gate was pushed open and the mismatched trio rode out, into the crisp air and clear light of the second dawn.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Once outside, Jeb immediately scanned the area for landmarks.

Lesser Kells, the young captain concluded, recognizing a distinctive peak at the horizon. Just across the Gap, probably – said peak was the only thing in sight that looked familiar, distances were rather tricky to judge in the mountains, and low hanging clouds shrouded most of the slopes beneath them. An overgrown, but obviously once-paved road snaked downhill, disappearing into the dense wood within some fifty yards of the gate.

The Alchemist, riding his horse with all the grace of a sack of potatoes, followed the road. Descending in serpentines, it took the horses nearly twenty minutes to get a thousand yards, as the crow flies, away from the gate, to a point where the hillside must have given way at some time after the construction of the road, which brought the latter dangerously close to the edge of a sheer precipice. The opportunity was so perfect that it took nothing more than a shared look to coordinate the attack, as soon as the old landslide came into view.

The Alchemist, however, decided to make things even easier.

"You two, get off the horses! Then follow me closely!" he ordered the grey-clad men behind him, barely bothering to turn his head.

Proceeding as ordered, Jeb and Zero led their horses forward at a slightly faster pace than the Alchemist kept astride on his mount. By the time the man opened his mouth to snap at them to slow down, they were already level with his saddle girth. Instead of falling back, Jeb snatched the reins out of the pale man's grip with one hand and pulled his boot out of the stirrup with the other. Simultaneously, Zero took care of the other stirrup, grabbed the Alchemist's arm and pulled.

The pale man, too astonished to scream, plunged gracelessly over the neck of Zero's horse. He then tried inexpertly to break his fall with his hands – something did indeed break, audibly – and finally rolled, head over heels, down the steep slope. Before his feet touched ground again, he ran out of slope. A muffled scream followed him into the misty depth.

To his own – and the older man's – surprise, the young captain found himself sharing a grin with the ex-Longcoat general, before they both remounted.

The older man made no comment when Jeb kept the reins to the riderless horse as they veered off sharply from the road and into the dense wood, and the horse followed willingly, possibly hoping for another handful of oats.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who might be interested, there's a story that explains just what could happen to a cursebreaker who doesn't know what he's doing. Check out **Thief** , if you will.


	8. Decision

The first – and shared – course had been _away_. They had put another mile between them and the entrance of the mine before they came across a high cliff that allowed for some range of vision and further orientation.

Captain Cain wasn't happy to find that he was still as unfamiliar with the area as before. He really hated the prospect of having to ride down dew-slicked mountain sides with something like the Alchemists at his back, and all the kinds of nasty traps that local geography tended to throw across the unaware traveler's path up here before him. Gullies, cliffs, unfordable whitewater streams ….

But that couldn't be helped. Downhill would bring him to the Gap, and following the Gap south would eventually end up near the place where his erstwhile rebel camp had been.

Zero was staring downhill, too. "How far is the nearest of your troops stationed?" the ex-general asked abruptly.

 _Damn_. And here Jeb had been hoping that the truce forged from sheer self-preservation beneath the mountain would actually survive to see the light of day. Palace life had really made him soft, the young captain concluded, Jeb Cain the rebel leader would have never been that naïve.

"Go to hell, Zero," he snapped, to hide his frustration.

Said insufferable bastard snapped right back. "Oh, come on, boy! These guys are going to hole up for good, as soon as they are sure we have escaped beyond retrieval. So, time is of essence. Or do you _want_ them to get away with ... _all this?!"_

 _Man had a point._ "Two days, minimum," the young captain admitted grudgingly. And that was optimistically assuming that he didn't run into an unexpected obstacle on the way.

"Hm. Then mine are nearer. Come along, boy." The ex-general urged his mount forward, with barely a backward glance.

 _No way in hell!_ So maybe the truce had not collapsed completely, yet, but Jeb would be damned if he followed the man into a Longcoat encampment, next. The captain of the Royal Guard pulled back the lapel of the stolen tunic, revealing his rank badge underneath. "If you think, I'm going to give myself into Longcoat hands so easily …"

"Keep it down, boy!" came back a sharp hiss. "Redtop here," a nod uphill, "is a famous echo wall."

Then the older man visibly changed mental gears. "You won't come to harm, boy, you have my word on it. But I doubt the time is right for a joint operation, yet, so I need to keep that two days head start between taking out the Alchemists and having half of the Queen's army after me."

 _Yeah, sure, because the word of an outlawed Longcoat is worth that much._ Besides, "And your men will just let me walk through their camp, too, I suppose, huh?"

Zero shrugged.

"Funny thing about being a general, there are very few people you have to justify your actions to," he said matter-of-factly. "Though, if you could manage to keep the royal crest out of sight, that would make things much easier."

That … actually sounded sincere. _Weird._ Worse, the young captain couldn't shake the feeling that his accusations had taken the older man by surprise.

Furthermore, any sort of fight, potentially within hearing of the enemy's main door, could land any survivors back in a cell beneath the mountains. _Unacceptable_. At best, it would delay the arrival of troops to the point where the Alchemists _did_ get the chance to dig in to the point of becoming impregnable, which also counted as unacceptable in Jeb's books.

"Fine," the young captain said through clenched teeth. "I'll go with you, until the Alchemists are finished off. On one condition, though."

The ex-general scowled but nodded to go ahead.

"You stop calling me 'boy'! I have a proper name and you know it!" Jeb was an adult, for storm's sake! Even if he looked lanky like a colt; not to skirt the edges of starvation anymore had given him another couple of inches in the last few cycles, but had not yet managed to bulk him up, accordingly.

The scowl turned back into a smirk.

"Privilege of age, boy," Zero drawled. "I'm old enough to be your father, I get to call you 'boy'. Or, if you prefer that, I could go for 's…'"

"Don't!" the young captain cut in, deadly sincere. "Seriously, don't. You try that, I'll kill you."

The smirk went thoughtful, then something that might have been actual respect. "If you insist, Cain. But that name will get you a lot of unwanted attention at the camp. You might want to come up with an alias."

Jeb gave it only minute consideration; on one hand, it felt like sacrilege to put this name into Zero's – _Zero's!_ – mouth, but on the other, it had to be something he'd react to naturally. "Jeb Graham, then. Call me Jeb Graham."

The ex-general nodded without a sign of recognition. "Fine, Graham. Now hurry up."

Oo oo oo oo oO

They had traversed at least two miles of adverse terrain before Zero turned to Jeb with the lazy smirk of a well-sated predator. "Wyatt Cain married Adora Graham, on midsummer's eve twenty years ago."

The young captain nearly fell off his horse.

"How do you know that?" he demanded to know, once he had come past the speechless-with-shock phase.

"It was the talk of the whole department." That had a ring of truth to it, but it certainly wasn't the whole truth. A terrible suspicion grew in the young man.

"You went after my family because my mother chose my father over you!" It was true, Jeb knew with stomach-turning certainty, little snippets of fact suddenly snapping together.

His mother's advice – in one of the last conversations they'd had – not to overplay his fierce rebel fighter persona when trying to catch a certain girl's interest. Not because that would have entailed the risk of getting betrayed to the Longcoats, the girl in question was too trustworthy for that, but because ' _smart girls flirt with the dangerous guys, but they don't bring them home_.'

His father's more recent explanation, when Jeb had demanded to know why some of his former rebel buddies had been denied entry into the ranks of the newly reformed Tin Men. _'Some join the Tin Men to protect the innocent and some to punish the guilty, and you have to balance the two, very carefully, or you might just as well dress them in black.'_

"I went after Cain because I had orders to," the former Longcoat gave back sharply. "That is something your father never understood. A tin man is bound by law, a soldier is bound by his orders. I thought a captain of the Royal Guard would know the difference."

"Oh yeah? I'm sure you were heart-broken when you got that particular order, Zero."

The ex-general shrugged off the accusation. "It's not like your father didn't know what the price for insurrection was. He made his decision, I made mine, and I warned him not to presume on old time's sake. You know what he said to that? ' _Not if I see you first.'_ "

The older man grinned humorlessly. "Knowing what sort of crack shot your father is, I made sure he didn't."


	9. General

* * *

There had been no obvious signs of alarm or pursuit, but they still pressed on as fast as the horses could go, over steep inclines and rough, often stony underground.

Around noon they let the horses drink from a little brook, resting for maybe half an hour. Jeb Cain was glad for the double layer of clothes he wore, it was cold so far up the mountains. He took some small satisfaction from seeing the ex-Longcoat general pace, arms wrapped tightly around his torso to stave off shivering, but not as much as he once would have.

"Let's lay down some ground rules for that Graham boy," said general suddenly declared, not even bothering to look at the younger man. Irritated, Jeb wished him as much discomfort as was possible in the brisk but clear weather.

"What happened to _'nobody's going to question the general'_?" he gave back sharply.

"Nobody will – if I behave as usual," Zero drawled, evil smirk back in full force. "So, don't give me cheek, and I won't put you in your place."

The older man was enjoying this _way_ too much. "I'm not going to call you 'sir,'" the young captain warned him.

"Your choice. If you don't mind every man within hearing to remind you …" If the man showed any more teeth, Jeb was going to knock in some of them.

_And yet …._ The young captain tried to imagine any of the briefings he'd attended since joining the Royal Guard, without the automatic address of respect for any of the senior officers present. Regular military simply didn't work that way.

Accustomed to being his own commander-in-chief as Jeb had been, it had taken a bit of getting used to. Nowadays, he barely noticed it anymore, unless the senior officer in question was exceptionally dense or otherwise insufferable.

_Insufferable, textbook example of. Here we come._

Oo oo oo oo oO

They talked very little for the rest of the day. One sun had dipped behind the far-away mountaintops, and the first moon risen, before Jeb pushed his horse forward, as if tired of riding behind the ex-general.

"We are being watched," he said quietly as he passed the other man, "red maple, right ahead. Another in the hazels to the left."

The other man gave no indication of having heard, instead he called out after a few seconds, "Don't get ahead of yourself, boy."

Indignantly, the young captain stopped his horse.

"Outer perimeter," Zero said just as quietly when he pulled even again, before continuing, in a carrying voice, "Get up, men, you've been spotted."

More than a score of men, not counting the lookouts Jeb had spotted, rose from a hidden depression in the ground.

The former rebel did not try to reach for his knife because his hand was curled around the grip already. The restraining hand around his arm was not missing several fingers solely because that would have given away said knife, and with more than twenty rifles pointing in their general direction, Jeb wasn't going to give up whatever little advantage he might hold. But if Zero didn't give him some warning, next time he tried that sort of stunt ….

One of the men stepped forward, gun at the ready though not _quite_ aimed at the new arrivals.

"Parole, sir?" he asked, face hard and unreadable.

"Whatever I say goes," Zero snapped at him. "I'm making them up, remember, Collins?"

"Yessir. Parole. Sir?" The man was not budging an inch.

The Longcoat general grinned savagely. "Good man. All hail the Queen."

The young captain almost swallowed his tongue in shock. _That_ was the current Longcoat parole?! How unlikely … which obviously was the point of a parole, but that sort of sarcasm … was very much Zero, he realized grudgingly.

The lookout seemed satisfied, in any case. He saluted smartly. "Pass, friend."

Collins stepped aside, granite face breaking into a smile.

"Sir," he said, when Zero's horse passed him, "good to have you back, sir."

_Odd._ The Longcoat general had always struck Jeb as the sort of commander that was obeyed because he was more fearsome to his men than was the enemy.

Another two hundred paces, another challenge. Zero answered it briskly, then they scaled another ledge and the young captain found himself atop row upon well-organized row of tents, a regulation army camp. He swallowed heavily.

The outer perimeter had worn normal clothes, but here black uniforms dominated the scene – and those did _nothing_ for Jeb's peace of mind. The trees obscured the actual dimensions of the camp, but there had to be at least a thousand men under Zero's command.

The young captain caught the sly grin the general was sporting as the latter looked back to see why the second horse had stopped following, and pulled himself together. Swallowing his pride, he urged his mount forward, making sure to keep next to the smirking man as if cowed by the massive enemy presence.

Which he was, honestly. Before the Eclipse, Jeb had never seen so many Longcoats in one place, and then he had been pretty sure that he was going to die in the ensuing battle. But since he hadn't ….

The rebel leader who had struggled to keep less than a hundred people in a shape fit for fighting, and the captain of the Royal Guard who had learned that maintaining an army was still hard work with the ruling Queen's backing, was now thinking furiously.

_How could such an army be fed? Where had all the equipment come from?_ There had been no reports of raids on the scale needed for so many men to 'live off the land,' which pointed to more or less covert support from a non-negligible portion of the realm.

Many, many black-clad figures surging towards them derailed Jeb's train of thought. The thoroughfare between the tents immediately in front of them cleared completely, everyone making way for the approaching riders, but the way was lined by men, packed tightly between the tents.

"General's back," dozens of voices murmured, there were no outright cheers, but the men were obviously glad to get their general back.

A big sergeant was shouldering his way through the masses. He felt vaguely familiar to the young captain, possibly part of the background in one of Zero's raids.

"Glad to have you back, sir," the big man rumbled with real affection in his voice, before falling into step beside his general.

The latter barely acknowledged his presence with a nod, but started rapping out orders immediately. "I want the men ready for march at midnight. Scouts in one hour. Officers to report in thirty minutes."

"Yessir. What gear, sir?" The sergeant seemed to be quite used to that sort of behavior.

"Fighting gear only. I want them fit for attack some twenty miles uphill."

"Yessir." The big man fell back, shouting orders.

Jeb followed Zero to a tent near the middle of the camp, reluctantly left his mount to the groom surging forward to take care of the horses, and ducked into the tent in the general's wake before anyone could question his right to be there.

He watched the older man drop into a field chair, looking for the first time in hours as if he'd just spent a full day in the saddle, after a night of dodging half an army all the way through an enemy installation and an unaccountable amount of time without sleep before that.

_Tough_. The first shock of seeing the gigantic camp had worn off and now the young captain felt only anger. "You never really meant to let me go, did you?"

The Longcoat general blinked. "Now what, boy?"

"That's at least two battalions out there," Jeb snarled.

Zero still stared at him blankly. "So? Get to the point!"

The young captain didn't buy the ignorant act."You expect me to think you're going to let me take that sort of information back to the Queen?!"

"The Queen can count!" the Longcoat general snapped. "Or at least the Crown Princess can. The number of Longcoats at large is hardly a secret."

Now it was Jeb's turn to blink. _You better don't mean that you're in command of all of them, Zero, 'cause that would be more than twice than what I've already seen._

"And their position isn't, either?" he shot back quickly.

There was a momentary spark in the older man's eyes, as if the young captain had just given away some vital information, before the expression melted into a smirk that contained entirely too many teeth.

"Wanna try and get me," the general challenged, leaning in close enough to make sure he was heard even at a whisper, "Cain?"

The tread of heavy boots approaching put an end to the argument. The big sergeant reappeared, carrying a heavy, covered bowl.

"Hot water, sir," he said without further ado.

Zero stared at the bowl for a moment, as if he'd had no idea that such a thing existed. Then he nodded, rubbing one hand over his face.

"Good idea, Heawl."

"Yessir. I'll take care of the boy, sir." Half question, half statement, the massive man barely waited for his general's dismissive wave before he pulled Jeb out of the tent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Any halfway serious parole gets changed at not too long intervals, or else as soon as someone knowing it gets compromised. So, no, _All hail the Queen_ is not the current Longcoat parole. I imagine, though, that there's a codeword for those no longer aware of the current parole but in need of identification as friendlies, and as either under duress or not (here: basic codeword with a positive/negative qualifier). And the man who gets snarky at his own general, and within the Sorceress's potential hearing, would probably choose _Queen_ as said basic codeword, just for the chance of using it in the described way. ;)


	10. Officers

Once outside, the young man brushed off the grip on his shoulder angrily.

Or tried to. The large hand refused to budge, the grip tightening into something that would have taken a real attack to dislodge. Not – _quite_ – ready to start a fight in the middle of a huge Longcoat encampment, Jeb Cain allowed himself to be led to an array of logs around a tiny fire, a little off the officers' tents.

"Sit, boy," Sergeant Heawl said gruffly, pushing him down on the one unoccupied log, and took a seat himself. A handful of other men congregated on the rest of the logs.

"Talk, boy," a sharp-featured colonel around forty demanded.

 _Silence is not an option_ , the tone said loud and clear – _and wasn't it always a lovely evening when a Longcoat officer used_ that _tone on one?_ It didn't take conscious thought to slip back into the scared kid persona that had successfully gathered intelligence right under the nose of more Longcoats – in garrison or on patrol – than Jeb cared to count. One part fear, one part deference – not as much eager-to-please as respecting-a-position-of-power – and just a dash of longing. He had been recruited, more or less forcefully, on no less than six independent occasions.

"Who are you?" the officer demanded to know.

"Jeb, … Jeb Graham, sir. From Lettins, sir." Ducking his head prophylactically to shelter from a cuff around the ears, for talking too much or not telling enough – did it matter what? – was an automatic reaction that also allowed the former rebel to scan his opponents unobtrusively.

Beside the hawk-faced colonel directly opposite, there was another one, rather thin and plain looking. Plus, three majors: one with the blackest eyes Jeb had ever seen in an otherwise average face, one short and stocky with a faded but nonetheless vicious scar from the corner of his jaw, across the throat and down into his collar, and one with a round, pleasant face that was utterly at odds with both the uniform and his steely expression. And also, two captains: one a nondescript man in his early thirties, the other not much older than Jeb himself, with razor-sharp cheekbones and cold grey eyes.

"Tell us everything you know about the general," Colonel Hawk-face, obviously the spokesman of the illustrious circle, demanded.

 _He's – by his own admission – a killer who likes his job and the most wanted man in the Realm. But you should all know this already._ "I don't know, sir … I just met him last night or maybe yesterday afternoon, hard to tell ..."

"Where?" the colonel had, matching his hooked nose, a way of jerking forward that also reminded the young captain of a stooping bird of prey.

"In a cell," the former rebel admitted hesitantly.

That caused angry rumbles all around, quickly silenced by another hawkish "Where?" cutting in.

"Somewhere underneath Redtop, sir. There's an Alchemist compound up there."

"Alchemists!" A couple of men spat on the ground.

Jeb blinked. Alchemists and Longcoats had been on the same side for many annuals, and while he was no longer certain that Zero had been using hyperbole when telling him that some of the Alchemists' deeds sickened even the most heartless Longcoats, the young captain had not expected so violent a reaction.

"Did it," Hawk-face was chewing his words as if they tasted rather foul, "look as if ... he spent some time there?"

 _Huh?_ If that wasn't a loaded question, Jeb had never heard one.

"He was in a pretty bad shape, then," the former rebel answered cautiously.

The sergeant nearly got to his feet, he and a couple of other men shot a look back at the general's tent. "Too damn stubborn for his own good," Jeb could have sworn the big man was mumbling under his breath.

"Explain!" the colonel demanded before the mutterings got out of hand.

A list of physical injuries later – the man's state of mind was neither safe to mention nor his to divulge – the former rebel had an odd sort of mirror-inverted déjà-vu. That sort of flinty-eyed anger he had seen at the news about many a Longcoat atrocity, usually those that were soon to be avenged.

"He isn't hiding … _that_ under those rags." Mostly statement with just a hint of disbelieving question from Major Black-eyes, and Heawl _was_ on his feet.

Jeb hurried to explain the most salient points of their escape.

He hadn't gotten past the mad Viewer before the sergeant started cursing, in a soft tone but a language so vile that Captain Cain couldn't help but shoot a disbelieving look at the assorted high-ranking officers.

The black-eyed major met his eyes squarely. "The general went missing two and a half weeks ago."

 _Oh, fuck._ Zero had met the Viewer probably more than once before the last night. No wonder he had been so keenly suicidal.


	11. Men

Jeb Cain had not realized how much the image of the disheveled prisoner had kept the nightmares featuring the well-groomed officer at bay, not until he stepped back into the tent and the big sergeant almost walked into him because his blood had turned, momentarily, to ice. Back in immaculate black, washed and shaven, his old nemesis was giving the young captain flashbacks, right back to the child held helpless in a grown man's grip.

Zero, of course, noticed the hesitation and reacted predictably. The man sure thrived on provoking fear responses. The familiar smirk – satisfied with a hint of humor, _gah,_ he really knew how to read the signs by now – actually helped Jeb to regain his equilibrium.

At his continued approach, the general waved dismissively towards a folding desk at the back of the tent. "There's pen and paper over there, boy. Draw me a map, including everything you remember about the Alchemists' tunnels."

The order raised some eyebrows among the assembled officers, but only one openly made a comment, quickly shot down by his commanding officer.

Keeping one ear on the discussion behind him – to fish for names and any other signs of group dynamics that might prove useful – the young captain gathered his thoughts.

The motivation behind this command was threefold, he decided. Beyond the obvious, confirming intelligence, it also provided a convenient excuse to have the unknown youngster present in the command tent while battle plans were made. And it served as a gauge to find out just how much effort Wyatt Cain's son was willing to put into a mission led by General Zero.

Jeb clenched his teeth. His father's son would not be found slacking in any undertaking he had agreed to participate in.

Oo oo oo oo oO

A good ten minutes later, he ran a last critical look over the product of his efforts, rolled it up carefully and turned towards the main table and the ring of black-clad officers surrounding it.

Heawl, who had taken up station against the tent wall right behind his general, cleared his throat.

Zero looked up, caught Jeb's eyes and waved him over. He snatched the map from the younger man's hands as soon as he came within reach, but made no comment when Jeb took another step forward, to a place where he had a good view of the table.

There were a handful of printed tactical maps, some lists and one other hand-drawn map, the latter nearly identical to the one the young captain had just sketched, though drawn in a much more formal way.

Jeb's handiwork was stretched out beside it and critically examined.

"Good eye, boy," the short major, _Anjil_ Jeb thought his name was, commented, but his eyes were on the general while he said that.

Zero gave back a wolfish grin and Jeb was certain of the identity of the man who had questioned his presence. He carefully stored the man's face and voice for later reference as _the man who talks back to General Zero_.

Colonel Reeds – thin as his namesakes – pointed at a crosshatched area beyond the corridors Zero had drawn. "What's that, Graham?"

"Heavy machinery, sir," the young captain explained. "I'm not sure what exactly, but I could hear it from here to here."

It took him until the end of the sentence to realized that he had attached the honorific without deliberate thought. A fact Jeb chose to attribute to the colonel speaking with exactly the same genteel accent as most of the Queen's old officers, who had resurfaced – from various hiding places, as rebels or more literally from cells beneath the Tower – after the Eclipse.

"Good ears, too," Major Anjil added, deadpan, and Zero's grin dissolved into a short bark of laughter. This time, though, the short, stocky man was sizing up Jeb – and the former rebel had met enough watchdogs to recognize the look of pointed interest.

More questions reclaimed his concentration before the young captain could figure out just what the other man was guarding so fiercely, but he certainly added a _bears further watching_ to his mental file on the short major.

Oo oo oo oo oO

After some further cross-examination – what had the young man seen, heard, noticed in any way or form of the underground compound and its denizens – interspaced with proposals how to deal with this and that, Anjil excused himself to get ready to move out with the scouts, and the general nodded to the sergeant.

Heawl placed a large hand on Jeb's shoulder. "Come with me, boy," he rumbled, leading the young captain towards the exit.

Satisfied that he knew at least the basic points of the plan the Longcoat officers had concocted, Jeb allowed himself to be led towards a nearby crew tent and the handful of black-clad soldiers crouching around the fire before it.

"Grub for the kid and a place to sleep," the big sergeant demanded, and a tin bowl full of something globby but surprisingly edible and a bedroll appeared as if by magic.

With his stomach reminding him that it hadn't seen proper food for _way_ too long, the young captain dug in eagerly, ignoring the knowing looks exchanged over his head.

After a moment, the soldiers resumed their previous occupations: one whittling, three smoking quietly, two carrying on with their discussion about the proper way to cook a hare – a topic so utterly mundane that Jeb could scarcely believe his ears – and let the young man eat in peace.

He had cleaned up most of the stew when one of the smokers flicked the butt of his cigarette into the fire, leaned forward and asked, suddenly intense, "How is the general?"

Adjusting his grip on the bowl before looking up, the former rebel found six pairs of eyes fixed on him; hungry, eager eyes, turned red by the reflection of the low-burning embers, which also set the metal buckles and gleaming black leather of their coats aglow. It took some willpower to calmly keep his seat, swallow the last mouthful and answer the question.

"Fine?" he ventured, every inch the young recruit, deeply uncomfortable with assessing a high-ranking officer. "I mean, he's here, in one piece, probably won't get much sleep tonight but …"

Some of the tension had receded at _one piece_ , but the spokesman – mid-thirties, lean but wiry – wasn't satisfied, yet.

"So he's alright, in here?" he asked, touching the side of his temple for a moment.

 _As much as he ever is._ "Seemed normal to me. Not that I know him that well," _oh, the irony of that statement,_ "but he knows places and people, acts smart, full of nasty plans for the Alchemists … Why do you ask?"

"You said it, kid," that was the whittler, unexpectedly. "Alchemists. When the Alchemists get someone, they often come back … _wrong._ Good to hear the general was tougher than they thought."

The first speaker nodded, relaxing visibly.

"So, what really happened up there?" he asked, waving vaguely uphill, and Jeb resignedly rehashed the account he had already given to the officers.

By the time he was finished, his bowl was empty, the red-eyed, fire-cloaked demons had relaxed into rather human men, and the approval in their eyes didn't have the slimy feel to it that the former rebel would have previously sworn Longcoat approval should have.

Lean-and-wiry stood and disappeared into the night with a curt, "I'll spread the word," and the rest of the men prepared to catch at least a few hours of sleep.

Belly filled with hot food, Jeb found an unoccupied corner in the tent. And when one of the men threw him a greatcoat to shelter against the cold mountain night, he could barely, just barely, accept that it was black leather in good grace.


	12. Uphill

Waking up with somebody's boot tip digging into his side – not very hard, but not very gently, either – was a real improvement, compared with the last few awakenings he'd had. It wasn't something young Captain Cain intended to make a habit of, nonetheless.

"Get up, boy," the shadowy figure rumbled, "we're moving out in ten minutes."

A mug of something hot and bitter was thrust into Jeb's hands. Having slept fully clothed, he was out and about immediately afterwards.

General Zero and a handful of officers were just mounting fresh horses – none was offered to the unknown "boy", of course, though no one kept Jeb from securing himself a position near the front of the troops – while the rest of the men were assembled in long, accurate lines. With little more than a gesture from the general and a few shouts from various non-coms, the Longcoats filed uphill.

Oo oo oo oo oO

The march through the nightly forest turned out to be a surreal experience.

There was just enough moonlight filtering through the foliage to avoid walking into a tree, but the hundreds of men in black uniforms around the young captain were nothing but a surging mass of shadow, darker than the general darkness between the trees, and the pale, floating smudges of faces. The men were marching in silence, but contrary to the nighttime forays Jeb had participated in as a rebel, no efforts were made to quieten their steps. The continuous impact of hundreds of pairs of boots on the soft forest floor surrounded the army moving up the mountain range with muted thunder, like the rumble of a distant storm. All in all, it was a rather uncanny effect.

The young man snorted to himself, remembering an ancient tale he had been told as a child. _If there ever was an army of the damned,_ this _has to be it._

The noise attracted the large shadow marching next to him.

"What's so funny, boy?" the big sergeant that had become, by some unspoken command or at least tacit agreement from Zero, Jeb's guardian – half bodyguard, half discouragement of escape – queried in a hushed but not unfriendly tone.

Making a split-second decision to simply speak his mind, the young captain replied in the same tone.

"I just thought that this," a wave went mostly unseen in the dark," looks like an army of ghosts."

"There are some people that call us the Army of the Damned," the large man replied seriously, eerily echoing Jeb's earlier thoughts.

The young man laughed uneasily. "Uh, really? They realize what that says about the general, right?"

"Suppose they do." Heawl seemed faintly amused, and when he turned the thought over, properly, Jeb realized that Zero was, in all likelihood, delighted about the epithet.

The young man shook his head.

"Great, just great," he said sarcastically. "Welcome to the Army of the Damned, now recruiting in a dark night near your home."

The sergeant actually chuckled at that, and Jeb, after a moment's hesitation, joined in.

Oo oo oo oo oO

They walked in amiable silence for a while, before the young captain decided to voice a question he'd been mulling over for a while.

"Sarge? How does it work, marching so many men though the darkness without falling over each other?"

"Best of the best," the large man said, without a trace of irony in his voice. Then he added, with a sudden grin, teeth a momentary flash against his tanned face, "And then, of course, there's this."

Heawl suddenly turned half away from the younger man, displaying white cross-belts across his back that glowed dimly in the moonlight. "Gives the men something to orient their lines on."

Looking around, Jeb made out occasional flickers that were, he supposed, other non-coms wearing the faintly luminescent cross-belts.

"And the boys with the best night vision form the first row," the older soldier finished his explanation.

Carefully storing the information away, the young captain grinned back.

"Best of the best, huh?" he asked, careful to keep all sarcasm out of his voice and even sound a little wistful.

He could feel more than see the sergeant throw him a sharp look before answering. "Still alive after six cycles, still in fighting shape, still holding discipline. General wouldn't have it any other way."

 _And that is the crux of the matter, isn't it?_ Zero had earned himself notoriety as a brutally effective rebel hunter, so Jeb could accept that the man knew enough to keep ahead of the chase; but without the backup enforcement of a higher authority, to be able to lead wasn't enough. People needed to _want_ to follow. To have a reason to follow.

"Why are they still here?" the young captain asked, pouring all of his honest confusion into the tone. "I mean, why don't they just go home?"

There was a razor-edge in Heawl's tone immediately. "Desert, you mean, boy. That's desertion you're talking about."

 _No, it's not. Not if the army you're serving in has been officially disbanded._ But habit, born of an adult life spent in uniform, was probably an important contributing factor.

Besides, this felt more comfortably like the Longcoats he knew and hated than most things Jeb had seen in the last twenty-four hours, so he decided to let it slide.

The sergeant, on the other hand, seemed to read something else into his sudden silence. "That's what you thought, boy, huh? That you could just go home and pretend everything was just a nightmare?"

The big man shook his head, the movement just barely visible in the darkness. "Life isn't that easy, kid."

 _Wait, what?_ The young captain didn't have to make up the splutter, the assumption was just that presumptuous. "I didn't … I'm not … I …"

"You, boy," Heawl cut him off, gravely, "are marching in step with me, in army boots. That takes some getting used to, you can't just grab a kid off the streets and expect it to work. So, you either lied about your age in your eagerness to serve in the new Royal Army – them being somewhat particular about taking on recruits that aren't of age, yet – and then you spontaneously decided to side with General Zero; or you're one of the last draftees the Sorceress took in. What's it gonna be?"

The big man paused, to let his words sink in. And Jeb – while once again grateful for his youthful appearance – was still at a loss for words and now very carefully reevaluating his chances to escape.

Unexpectedly, the sergeant continued in a much less severe tone. "Don't think you're the first lost little lamb that comes back into the fold, boy."

Another sudden grin, "Even if the rest wasn't personally escorted home by the general. So don't worry, kid, if he is fine with you here, I won't say a thing, either."

The grin vanished. "You got lucky, boy. I don't care if your family turned you loose for wearing the black coat or if you never made it that far. Just know that if you'd made it home, and they'd taken you in, and then someone recognized you, your family would have paid, too."

 _Is that what you tell your men? Zero, you lying bastard!_ "No! That's not …"

"True? Right? Fair?" Heawl cut across his heated response, with a flash of teeth that was _not_ a smile. "Says nowhere that it has to be. Winner makes the rules, that's a soldier's lot. And the Sorceress – _lost._ "

Biting his tongue before he said something decidedly non-Longcoat, Jeb glared back silently under cover of darkness. The older man was disturbingly matter-of-fact where the young captain would have expected resentment, but Jeb's and his compatriots' motives for hunting down the remaining Longcoats were a little bit more justified than simply Right of Strength, _thank you very much!_

Unwilling to further expand on that particular interpretation of current political situation, the young man vowed to keep silent for the remainder of the uphill march.


	13. Security

The first dawn was breaking when the main troop caught up with the scouts.

Leaving the men about a mile from the entrance of the mine, the officers and, at a nod from Zero, Jeb Cain and his guardian, held a short conference with the scouts' leader, Major Anjil.

"Everything's quiet, so far, but we found a sort of perimeter made of disks," the short stocky major reported.

"Mounted?" the Longcoat general asked sharply, causing Anjil to nod.

"Yes, sir. Overlapping fields of view, but no direct lines of sight between them." The major shrugged noncommittally. "I took the liberty of dropping a twig into one of them, under cover of dark."

"Someone's bound to check on the poor crippled thing soon, then," Zero concluded, a predatory expression growing on his face.

"Yes, sir. Permission to pick them off, sir?" Major Anjil sounded rather eager, too.

"Go ahead. But leave the uniforms presentable, and if there's an Alchemist involved, I want him alive."

The sparkle of amusement dancing in pale eyes told Jeb that he wouldn't like the next words, before the general was even looking in his direction. "And take the boy with you. He's been here before, let's give him the chance to make himself useful."

Unsure if he had just been insulted or complimented, the young captain followed the major closer to the entrance of the mine.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Some two hundred steps into the shelter of the trees, the scout leader stopped abruptly, using the steep incline to meet the younger man eye-to-eye despite his shorter stature.

"Surprise me, Graham," he said, tone as silky as the edge of a well-honed blade, "show me what gave the general such a high opinion of your usefulness, outside of … paper work."

 _Compliment then, of the underhanded kind,_ Jeb concluded. Aloud he said, "Two men beyond the firethorn to your left, sir. Another one twenty feet up in that maple. Sir."

Anjil blinked, nodded and suddenly grinned.

"I see," he said, "perhaps you won't be such a load, after all."

Summoning one of his men to spread the order to "Get into positions," the major motioned at Jeb to follow him and led the way further uphill and slightly towards the road.

Not quite sure what to look out for, the young captain nonetheless spotted the colorful disk, about the size of a large coin and turning slowly atop four feet of dull filigree metal, before the scout leader had to point it out.

Satisfied with this further proof of competence, Anjil showed him the extent of the perimeter on a map, and Jeb found, with some relief, that it fell just short of the ancient landslide.

Skirting the rough half circle of mounted disks, the young captain followed the major a few hundred yards further from the mine, to where an avalanche or rockslide had razed the bigger trees a few years ago, leaving the recovering undergrowth much denser than before.

The verdant growth emphasized a phenomenon which Jeb had noticed around the first recording disk, but had dismissed as a token effort to clear the view for the disks: the constructs sat within a sharply delineated strip of barren, almost sterile looking earth. Perfectly normal undergrowth camouflaged the thing up to about two yards distance and then ended abruptly, even including overhanging branches from trees further away.

"Alchemy," was Anjil's curt answer to Jeb's question of what had done that, one hand twitching into a warding gesture the stocky man probably wasn't even aware of. At the younger man's continued expectant look, he added a gruff, "Means, you're better off not knowing how it works."

"Is it safe to touch?" Jeb couldn't help asking. _Or even to get near it?!_

The short major shrugged. "For everything warm-blooded, it's supposed to be safe."

 _Now that was reassuring – NOT!_ The young captain vowed to keep his distance.

Oo oo oo oo oO

The sabotaged recording disk was stuck facing upslope, the twig thoroughly entangled between its turntable socket and the supporting pillar. There was only one way to logically approach it, and when the former rebel half-automatically scanned the area for a site to set up an ambush, he found the most advantageous positions already occupied.

The men were arranged as Jeb would have set them up _now_ , he realized after a moment, not quite as the rebel leader without any formal training would have.

But Anjil wasn't exactly playing by the book, either, there were some distinct elements of guerrilla tactics combined with classic formations, the young captain recognized.

Which might explain why Zero put up with a man that talked back, Jeb decided, seeing how in _his_ day the lack of conventional tactics had given him the edge of unpredictability that had kept the rebels one step ahead of the Longcoats.

Oo oo oo oo oO

It took another hour before a lanky Alchemist with a full dozen goons for escort cautiously made his way through the forest. To his surprise, the pale man found another grey-clad figure waiting impassively right behind the damaged construct. Several strict orders failed to provoke any reaction.

 _You'll do for bait_ , the stocky major had said, and Jeb had to admit that he had garnered everyone's attention – insofar as the term could be applied to the goons. He kept his motionless stance until the flustered Alchemist was within three steps of him, and then he smashed the disk. Before the shocked Alchemist could recover, the young captain had driven him to the ground with a flying tackle, and twenty Longcoats – sans the coats, ironically – fired a silent barrage of steel-fletched bolts into the backs of the unsuspecting goons.

The young Alchemist was still trying to catch his breath back when Major Anjil pulled him up by the lapels. "No time for dawdling, Pasty-face. There's someone who just can't wait to express his gratitude for your hospitality."

Oo oo oo oo oO

To minimize the delay and therefore suspicions on behalf of the other Alchemists, Zero had closed in as soon as lookouts had signaled the approaching repair team.

Now he was toying idly with his gauntlet, flanked by two captains and framed by a half circle of Longcoat soldiers that all shared Sergeant Heawl's massive stature. The man sure knew how to adopt a threatening position.

Anjil, in accord with the same time-honored Longcoat tradition, had detached his two most bulky men to drag the prisoner towards the waiting officers.

When they forced the young Alchemist to his knees before them, Jeb looked away.

He had seen this scene all too often, and his mind kept superimposing other frightened faces.

His eyes caught on a bundle of grey uniforms, summoning a ghostly echo of the dry rustle of stacked bodies creeping forward with mindless, automaton motions.

The young captain looked back, all sympathy evaporating. Momentarily, ironically, he felt _fully on the same side_ as the Longcoat general.

Zero bared his teeth in something that was to a smile what a shark is to a dolphin – same basic shape, quite a different animal.

"We can skip the introductions, I believe," he drawled. "I owe your kind a slow death, several times over. You get one chance to convince me to let you live a little longer. What kind of security measures are set up around the gate?"

The white-faced man sputtered for a moment, then found his voice and answered, nearly falling over himself in his haste to obey.


	14. Starting

From his outlook some twenty feet up a beech tree, Jeb Cain watched the first stage of the conquest of the Alchemist installation – and the general commanding it, a dozen feet beneath him.

Those long leather coats were not meant to climb on trees, but Zero had found himself a strong, wide tree limb stretching almost to the ground that enabled him to observe the first engagement unfold from an elevated point of view.

The older man had obviously seen the young captain on his perch, but had turned his back on the latter without a second thought. The former rebel couldn't quite believe the amount of trust – and/or arrogant over-confidence, Jeb hadn't yet figured out which, and wasn't sure if he wanted to – Zero was displaying by allowing said rebel to get into a position above and behind the Longcoat general.

The young captain had found four different ways, so far, to take advantage of the exposed back, neck and head, that would have killed his old nemesis and given Jeb a good chance to get away before the deed was discovered. After the fourth he had caught himself, decided that the sight of those black uniforms reacted badly with pre-battle nerves, and firmly put his mind on another track.

Pre-battle nerves with little chances to see any actual action, no less. Generals _were_ supposed to stay behind and keep an eye on everything, if the young captain understood these things correctly, but it was surprisingly hard to passively watch the dozen grey-clad Longcoat soldiers follow the sweating Alchemist towards the gate.

Jeb had always been a frontline leader, both as a rebel and a Royal Guard. Here, however, he was not even allowed to join the well-hidden line of men that would form the first wave to follow the disguised troops, as soon as the gate was open and secured.

When he had made to join them, the big sergeant had held him back.

"Easy there, kid, plenty of times for heroics later," he had said, looking faintly amused.

Zero, close enough to overhear him, had added, with a sardonic grin, "I would hate to write a notification of death to your family, boy."

It shouldn't have been that easy to lull him, but with the Longcoat general behaving almost human towards him, in the last two days, the casual cruelty of that suggestion had taken Jeb's breath away for a moment.

"You wouldn't!" he had gotten out in a strangled tone.

"I most certainly would, boy." There was a glimmer of dark humor in the older man's eyes, but the tone had been quite serious. "You wouldn't want to keep your old man wondering what has happened to you, for the rest of his life, would you, boy?"

Of course, Jeb didn't, but still …

"What would you write?" the young captain had ventured cautiously, tacking on a quick "sir" for the sake of the nearby sergeant.

The general had shrugged, smirkingly. "Well, that depends on whether it is stupidity or bravery that gets you killed."

Oo oo oo oo oO

The gate opened, after a short delay, for the false repair troop. There was a faint commotion once it started to close behind them, which served as a signal for the first wave of reinforcements to sprint across the coverless expanse before the gate.

They piled through the half-open gate, there were more muffled sounds of battle – Jeb had counted some two dozen goons in the cave behind it and the lanky Alchemist had stated that his escorts had not detracted from that count. Which left the disguised troops outnumbered two to one – and combined with the first wave outnumbering the defendants by about the same margin.

A few – _endless_ – minutes later, the gate reopened to its fullest extent, and a black-clad figure signaled the all-clear.

Another half-company of men and most of the officers advanced – _cautiously_ – towards the gate.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Compared with the high-strung tension of the forced inactive wait, the aftermath of the fight was rather anticlimactic. Except that the five-annual-old-on-a-sugar-rush feeling of unspent adrenaline still coursing through Jeb's veins painted the ugly aftereffects in extra lurid detail.

There was a red spray on one of the door wings, turning into a smear halfway down to the floor. The air was heavy with the stench of torn bodies, yet without the distinctive smell of spent explosives that the young captain automatically associated with it.

Major Anjil, in blood-smeared grey, was discussing something sophisticated a bit off the gate with two of his men. He turned towards his general at the latter's entrance, with a warning, "Stay back, sir, it might still be booby-trapped."

The major was bleeding from cuts across the temple, jaw and shoulder he didn't even seem to notice.

"Casualties?" Zero asked sharply.

"Jarn, Ejie, Goen dead; Killiv's taken a shock-stick to the throat, he won't make it much longer, sir."

The major held out what looked to Jeb like a pair of rather crumpled envelops. Zero gave them a discomforting glare, before tucking them securely into an inner pocket of his coat.

"A couple of scratches for the rest, nothing serious," the scout leader went on, and then pointed at the sparking thing before them – possibly the display console for the read-out of the perimeter discs, Jeb thought. "Rubber-frocked bastard blew himself up, taking three of his and two of ours with him."

"And half of him," the short major waved dismissively towards the wall where the young Alchemist prisoner had slumped against it, eyes glassy with shock and cradling a literally shredded arm, roughly tied off above the elbow.

"He's out of commission for a while, at least, I'm afraid," Anjil finished his report.

Zero nodded and snapped at the nearest Longcoat soldier, "Get me Fitzalan! He's to find out what blew up here."

The young grey-eyed captain soon hurried over, and started to scan the complicated apparatus. The look on his face was pure Glitch – and there were few things scarier than seeing _that_ look framed by a black leather collar, Jeb decided.

He watched the Longcoat captain – _Fitzalan_ , presumably – crouch to investigate some of the metal splinters on the ground, and then turn back to report.

"The splinters have been magnetized," Captain Fitzalan started to explain, holding out his booty to demonstrate how the fragments clung to each other. "And there is a strong magnetic component involved in the process of sending, propagating and receiving an information signal, for example holographic data, over a physical point-to-point or point-to-multipoint transmission medium …"

Going beyond scary, the man even _sounded_ like Glitch on a rant.

Zero seemed less than impressed, he made an impatient noise and the younger officer quickly came to the point. "The strong magnetic field was reversed in polarity and utilized to fling a prearranged cache of metallic shrapnel into the space before the readout console, presumably as a measure against unauthorized use. The reversal also caused a catastrophic inductive feedback loop and …"

The captain caught himself rambling again and visibly skipped another lengthy lecture. "In short, the thing is blown, sir. No energy left in the system for another trap. No use for surveillance, either, I'm afraid, without a thorough overhaul."

"Thank you for the concise explanation, Captain," Zero gave back sarcastically, causing the younger man to duck his head, and then inquired if the explosion had cost them the element of surprise.

It was likely but not certain it had, both Anjil and Fitzalan concurred, which made Zero scowl but then shrug philosophically, before he sent the pair off with orders to make sure the elevator was under upside control.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Giving in to the strong urge to _do_ something, Jeb asked for and obtained permission to join the black-clad men who were starting to harness the horses and lead them out, removing them from the space of the coming confrontation.


	15. Chances

_Hurry up and wait._ _The classic military way of doing things._

The horses were tethered outside, the wounded tended to, the rest of the troops outside apprised of the state of things, the bodies and the worst of the shrapnel had been removed, the elevator was secured, the entire cave checked – without result – for further ways of access, and now nearly a hundred men cooped up in the cave were waiting for something else to do.

Preferably something that didn't involve dying from the enemy's sneak counterattack from a hitherto undetected venue, but since the odds were not too unfavorable for that kind of outcome, nervous tension belied the relaxed positions some of the soldiers had assumed.

Fueled by instincts acquired in half a lifetime spent dodging Longcoats, Jeb Cain did not even bother to pretend relaxation.

When someone whistled half-loud behind him, his eyes automatically located the sound. About a dozen black-clad men were playing dice on the row of old packing crates stacked against the wall.

One of them, thickset and broken-nosed, called out, "Pet, hey, pet!"

When Jeb didn't react, the man gestured impatiently. "Yeah, I'm talking to you, Pet. What's the general up to?"

The young captain made _one_ deliberate step forward. "I'm nobody's pet!"

The other man smirked. "So? Then who's been following the Old Man around like a lost puppy, huh?"

"Man, don't be so insensitive," another jumped in in mock-concern. "Can't you see the poor little thing's crushing on the general?"

Thin and red-haired, the second man started to make exaggerated kissing noises.

Jeb decked him. The first speaker started forward and doubled over around an elbow to the solar plexus, followed up with a knee to the chin. The rest of the group rose in unison, but then the nascent brawl froze, at a distinctly deadly sounding crackle behind them.

"Now, look at this, the pup has teeth," Major Anjil declared, his silky tone barely audible across the sound of the shock-stick in his hand, discharging continuously into the metal fittings of a crate beside him. "So, play nice, boys, and nobody gets hurt."

A general, abashed chorus of "Yessir", and the soldiers backed off.

The major, however, stepped closer to the young captain.

"They do have a point, though, Graham," he said conversationally, leaning hazardously onto the – now mercifully quiet – shock-stick. "I haven't seen the general as tolerant with a tagalong since the toy-boy."

"Toy-boy?" Jeb echoed, not liking the sound of that, at all.

"Toy-boy," the stocky scout leader confirmed with a smirk, then went mock-serious. "That's Captain Timotheus Fitzalan to you, soldier."

"The engineer?" the young captain ascertained. _And that better didn't sound as relieved aloud as it did in my head_.

With an entirely too smugly knowing look, Anjil paused for a moment before he nodded. Leaning back against a tall crate, he went on, reminiscing, "Young Timotheus was younger than you are now, boy, when he was apprenticed to one of the Royal engineers, shortly before the Sorceress took the throne. Showed enough talent that the Alchemists grabbed him for themselves afterwards."

The smile on the older man's face was pure teeth. "After half an annual, he was ready to blow himself up, along with their newest invention. The general – he was still only a captain then, mind you – caught him crossing some wires, pulled him off and gave him a good thrashing. The boy's master took a look at the damage, declared that his apprentice had neither the skill nor the knowledge to do any real damage, threw a switch and got roasted in a rather spectacular bout of lightning."

The sharkish expression went satisfied, then serious. "Zero went back to the kid and told him, _'If you're that eager to die, here's a shovel, dig a grave and I'll put a bullet through your head when you're finished. If not, get out of that ugly frock and into a proper uniform, I could use a boy that can out-wire a Master Alchemist. Either way, I'll put you down as a casualty of the explosion in my report.'_ "

The major shrugged. "The boy stripped. And so the general got himself his own private engineer. Even talked Lonot into making the kid a cadet."

Another sharkish grin. "But of course, the general always had a good eye for talent, and he usually gets what he wants. Right now, he's after you, Graham – if I were you, I wouldn't make a fuss."

With those ominous words, the short man turned and sauntered off, brushing past Sergeant Heawl halfway across the cave, who was coming to summon Jeb to General Zero.

Oo oo oo oo oO

When he neared the knot of officers, Jeb caught the tail-end of Anjil's request for replacements for his fallen scouts.

"… and for the last, I call first dips on the Graham boy."

Zero smirked down on the shorter officer, eyes full of dark humor. "So eager to see him die? That's bloodthirsty, even for you, Anj."

The stocky major remained unfazed. "The boy's a natural. I give him better than even chances to stay alive."

Zero nodded to concede the point, but brushed off the request with a curt, "Ask again when we're finished with this and he's still alive."

Then he half-turned to acknowledge the newcomers – though the former rebel would have bet anything that the Longcoat general had been aware of every syllable he – Jeb – had overheard.

The general gestured towards the grey-eyed captain beside him. "Fitzalan, take Graham with you when you check out the ventilation system."

With a smirk he added, "As you heard, Major Anjil gives him better than even chances to stay alive. Try to do the same."


	16. Downward

Leading the way towards a dozen men already assembled near the entrance – all of them on the lanky side of things, Jeb Cain noted, and armed with the short, stubby shotgun that was the smallest of the standard Longcoat weapons – the grey-eyed captain had barely a sidelong glance to spare when he asked, briskly, "Have you ever fought in a gasmask, Graham?"

 _Huh?_ "No, sir."

Fitzalan gave a huff of annoyance. "Have you ever worn one, at least?"

"Once, sir." When Glitch had insisted that anyone to enter a certain level beneath the Witch's Tower should wear the protective gear. They hadn't gone very far – the greenish haze at the bottom of a stair had convinced everyone that going further wasn't worth the risk. The experience had left Jeb with little love for the things: on top of the unsettling implications of airborne dangers, they were hot, suffocating and left the wearer with the field of vision of a blinkered horse.

The young engineer harrumphed unconvincedly, but signaled his small detachment to follow and set out towards the rest of the troops hidden among the trees before the mine.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Near the line of tethered horses, a number of packs had been piled up carefully, guarded by several men and a sergeant.

"Fourteen sets of masks, plus lights," the grey-eyed captain addressed the non-com, threw a look over his shoulder and added, "and a coat for the boy, might as well protect the skin, too."

The masks in their heavy pouches were quickly produced from the heap of special equipment, as were sturdy looking lamps, but then the sergeant balked. "Why didn't he get a coat back at the camp? Sir?"

Captain Fitzalan shot the man a look that Jeb had seen, in exactly the same form, on Zero's face before, and could therefore interpret easily. It was a _keep pushing me at your own peril_ look, and made the older and more massively built non-com visibly uncomfortable.

"Because the general has not yet decided to properly enlist him, that's why," the captain snarled, "and now get me my gear, Sergeant!"

The man complied. And Jeb decided that it might be more sensible to quietly don the black coat thrust in his direction under the circumstances. He had come this far armed only with a knife, he would just keep on going; to ask for a gun now would probably not improve the situation.

Oo oo oo oo oO

The ventilation system of the mine drew in fresh air via the main shaft, used a complicated arrangement of fans to distribute it throughout the tunnels – Jeb remembered seeing a pair of fans at every major junction, down there – and finally expelled the used-up air through an auxiliary shaft ending about a hundred yards above and thrice that to the left of the mine entrance.

Or so Fitzalan explained while leading the way towards said auxiliary shaft. Sitting within a vein of motley striped rock, the darkness of the opening blended nearly invisibly into the darker parts of the surrounding stone.

Except that the paler streaks weren't a different material, but the original rock, bleached bone-white in irregular tongues around the vent. Suddenly reminded that they were approaching the _exhaust_ of an _Alchemist_ installation, the heavy pouch containing the gasmask became a reassuring weight on Jeb's hip.

Some fifty yards from the opening, the Longcoat captain signaled a stop and started to scan the area ahead with a gadget he had drawn from his pocket. Satisfied with the results, he then led on.

Letting himself fall back deliberately, Jeb quietly asked the man beside him, "What's that …," he waved towards the young engineer, "… thingamajig?"

The other man shrugged.

"No idea," he gave back just as quietly, "but the one thing you must know about the captain, kid, is never to ask him any questions. You won't like it if he starts explaining."

The lanky soldier covertly mimed his head exploding, and Jeb gave back a grin.

"No worries, I won't," he started, before screaming instincts made him look up abruptly.

The grey-eyed engineer was watching him with a predatory look that was also pure Zero. "You won't _what_ , Graham?"

Refusing to be cowed by a man five annuals his senior, _at most_ , the young captain of the Royal Guard gave back the look, evenly. "Won't ask about your scanner, sir."

The man beside him groaned, nigh inaudibly. Fitzalan, however, cocked his head, visibly changing mental gears.

"It's … a canary, of sorts. Tells me when the air becomes dangerous to breathe." And with that surprisingly concise explanation, he turned on his heels and kept on climbing up the treacherous slope, leaving utterly bewildered men in his wake.

Oo oo oo oo oO

There was a grate blocking the way, a few yards beyond the opening into the mountainside, but the corroded metal gave way after a few determined kicks. The bars were also spaced too far apart to keep out bats or other small critters, and yet there were no signs of any animal occupants.

No signs of occupants _past or present_ , Jeb observed, even though the roughly hewn and sheltered tunnel, with its constant flow of exhalation to attract small insects, should have been a favorite place for bats and spiders to settle in during the mining days. Either the Alchemists had been occupying the old mine for much longer than half an annual, or the vapors scouring the tunnel also spotlessly removed guano and old cobwebs.

The young captain of the Royal Guard wasn't sure which would be worse. He mulled over the question for some fifty careful steps into the mountain, before the ventilation tunnel abruptly started to slant downward. The faint draft of stale-tasting air blowing towards them became more noticeable.

Fitzalan kept scanning the airflow. He had kept his men in a good spread on the scree outside, but the roughly circular cross-section of the tunnel left little space to spread out sidewise, forcing the group into single file.

Now that the tunnel had angled down, he found that the confined, rock-enclosed space made every noise resound and echo to the point where a shouted order would not only become unintelligible by the time it was ten yards away, but also bounce its way all the way down to the mine.

Jeb heartily agreed with the other captain's scowl when the latter ordered everyone to stay close.

Oo oo oo oo oO

There was no time to think, just to react. Jeb felt the floor give minutely beneath his boot, some two hundred paces down the steep incline, and dove for the ground, dragging the nearest person he could get his hands on down with him.

Someone shouted, "What the …?!" behind him and a hand grabbed for his collar, but by then the young captain of the Royal guard had already unbalanced his first victim, and the combined momentum of two falling bodies plus the downward angle of the floor merely pulled the third man down, too, on top of Jeb.

Then there was only a shrill whistle that grew into a shriek and a warm, heavy rain.


	17. Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore warning. I mean it! Very little violence, but the graphic aftermath.

* * *

As a child Jeb Cain had heard the old saying that if you gave in to hatred you'd eventually drown – either in your own blood or that of your enemies.

Then, with all the arrogance of a ten-annual-old – too old to fall for scary stories – he had taken it for a figure of speech. Some time later he had learned that the former was actually possible, if something tore through a major blood vessel on its way to the lungs.

Now, pinned facedown by the heavy body dropped across his back, with his head the lowest part of his body and a warm viscous mass encroaching on his chin as it oozed down the slope, Jeb spat out blood and got closer to panic than he had in annuals at the thought of falling prey to the latter. Whether the men whose … _remains_ threatened to suffocate him still qualified as enemies, was a rather irrelevant question under the circumstances.

Some desperate wriggling finally gained him a free arm, but when he pushed back against the man on top of him, his hand encountered something that was slimy, squishy and spiky all at once – _never a good combination_ – and the shrieking started up, again.

Reflexively hugging the ground as close as humanly possible, it took the young captain of the Royal Guard a few moments to realize that this time it wasn't the screech of rapidly displaced air ringing in his ears, but a human voice pitched high in agony.

The realization came at about the same time as the other body on the floor nearby starting to move again. The movement uncovered the lamp that had been buried beneath it and the sudden bright light made Jeb see red.

Literally.

Every surface he could see was covered – in case of wall and ceiling dripping – with red. There were no bodies – save for the three still breathing ones on the floor – not even … recognizable pieces. Nothing but dripping, pooling, lazily flowing red.

_What in the name of all that was holy …?_

"Magnetic vortex … whole tunnel must be a gigantic coil … moritanium enhanced conductors …" Captain Fitzalan was white-rimmed around the eyes, looking about as shocked as Jeb felt, and babbling to himself – or maybe trying to answer Jeb's question, the younger Cain couldn't have sworn that he had not spoken out aloud.

In any case, the grey-eyed engineer reached over and helped to pull the – now mercifully merely moaning – body off the younger man's back. Daring to raise himself to his elbows, Jeb got his first proper look at the soldier that had tried to reach for him.

The man's back had been, quite literally, cut to ribbons. The young captain could see the shoulder blades blink palely from the gory mess, skin and muscle flayed away and the edge of the bone itself serrated where something had carved deep gouges into the topmost layer.

Swallowing bile, he shared a look with the other captain across the mangled back, both men uncertain if it was sensible to even try and tend to the gruesome wound, or if it would be kinder to quickly end the suffering.

Then the Longcoat captain seemed to reach a decision.

"Hold him down," he commanded, moving his bodyweight atop the injured man's splayed limbs on his side.

With a mental shrug, Jeb adjusted his own position, then watched the engineer fish a flat canister from one of the many pouches on his belt and unscrew its top. He heard the order to "Brace yourself!" but wasn't quite prepared for the hiss and fizzle the liquid splashed over the raw flesh produced, nor for the limp form to buck up once with an inhuman screech, before slumping once more. When he dared to look up again, the shredded back looked … _glazed_ , the bleeding all but stopped.

"Perhydrol, solvent-free," the grey-eyed captain answered his unspoken question. "Vicious accelerant, usually, but it also stops bleeding like little else does. I ..."

"… tell you I reset the sensors, so it has to be at least a bear looking for sleeping quarters that has set it off …" That was another voice entirely, and a good thirty yards up the tunnel.

Jeb had about one second to locate its source – two slickly coated men who had unexpectedly entered the ventilation tunnel from a hitherto invisible side-entrance– and another one to identify the contraption one of them was carrying.

The young captain of the Royal Guard had seen the devastation wrought by a flamethrower before. He had seen one in action, too, if only from a distance and at night – unless the Longcoats had somehow managed to harness a nigh-invisible dragon to raze that particular village. He had never seen one actually handled, until now.

Thirty yards were pushing the limit of the effective range of the weapon, something the Alchemist obviously wasn't used to do. The main jet of flame hit the ground some fifteen feet further up, and the rebound did what heat usually did and licked along the ceiling.

Hugging the ground, head covered by his leather-clad arms, Jeb was immensely grateful for the fact that thick, drenched leather didn't catch very well – even if it wasn't water that had done the drenching. He felt the fire roar over him for half an eternity – some fifteen seconds, more likely, in actuality – but just when the heat was about to become unbearable, it stopped.

Burned blood filled the tunnel with a nauseating stench and black, oily clouds of smoke, obscuring the view for the Alchemist clean-up crew and creating some momentary confusion about whether the intruders had been taken care of, or not.

_Amateurs, it's not like they have to worry about conserving ammunition._

Under the cover of the impromptu smokescreen, Jeb frantically dug for the gun the injured man had been carrying, intent to get off a shot before the Alchemist insisting that there had been no screams, however shortened, and therefore it shouldn't been assumed that the flames had actually hit their intended targets, won the argument.

His fingertips had just touched the barrel when he caught, from the corner of his eye, the other captain throw something at the pair of Alchemists.

Whatever it was, it shattered harmlessly against the wall some two steps in front of them. Heat shimmers and smoke concealed further details, but within seconds the pair went absolutely crazy, screaming and flailing about wildly.

Jeb didn't know if it was a reflexive spasm or sheer panic, but either way the man pulled the trigger again and demonstrated impressively why it is not a wise move to fire a flamethrower _straight across_ a tunnel about eight feet in diameter. The fuel tank of the weapon exploded some ten seconds after the pair had been engulfed by the ricochet.

Channeled by solid rock, the resultant fireball spewed one superheated tongue of flame in their direction, trying once more the poor flammability of drenched leather, before the rest of the flames followed the draft upwards. The airflow from the deep picked up speed noticeably.

When he was reasonably certain that no further jets of flame would come in their direction, Jeb cautiously raised himself into a sitting position and watched the inferno burn itself out.

"What the hell was that?" he demanded to know as soon as the roar had died down a little.

The grey-eyed engineer shrugged. "Backflow ignition, by the looks of it. The fire outside the tank superheated the fuel inside, the rising pressure forced the check valves open and exposed the highly combustible vapors inside to …"

"Let me rephrase that," Jeb cut him off. "What the hell did you throw at those guys?"

Fitzalan shot him a steely look. "Something the general would probably have my head for having, so you will not mention it again, clear?"


	18. Identified

Cold logic demanded that the trap that had reduced eleven men to dripping red would not be rearmed until the clean-up-crew had safely departed from the ventilation shaft, but in the end it was the prospect of belly-crawling through the liquefied and partly boiled or burned mess pooling and congealing on the floor, that convinced Jeb Cain to follow the young engineer's lead and make his way back up the tunnel by walking fully upright.

It made the task of taking the wounded man along substantially easier, too – though carrying him up the slippery slope had been a bitch, leaving him to drown in the gore-mired tunnel would have been unacceptable.

It took some searching and scraping off of charred … residues to locate the hidden side-entrance and equal amounts of engineering skill and brute force to get it open, quietly. They left the unconscious soldier between the double doors of the airlock-like structure and cautiously went to explore the corridor beyond it.

Ten yards before them a thickly insulated door opened into a wide hall, brightly lit and filled with rows and stacks of humming, whirring and occasionally crackling machinery.

Fitzalan's eyes lit up at the sight, like a small kid's in a candy store – or Glitch's at the same sight. Jeb _scowled_ at the same sight, as all those gleaming, moving, noisy pieces of indecipherable tech made it damned hard to spot hidden opponents, should there be any.

True enough, they had managed less than ten wary steps across the loudly ringing metal grating of a floor before a voice spoke up, half hidden by the first row of machines.

"Ah, there you are. What took you so lo…?" Halfway into his lecture before he bothered to look up, the pale man bent over some opened apparatus caught sight of the pair approaching him, shrieked and jumped back so violently that he knocked himself out against the metal girder behind him.

The two young captains stared at the unconscious figure, shared a look and ran a critical eye down each other, covered in gore from head to toe, from hair spiked up with drying blood to boots leaving red prints on the floor.

Highly – if somewhat hysterically – amused by the sight, the two young men started laughing, not very loud and only for a few moments, but very liberating. With a wide grin, the Longcoat captain looked suddenly his age, a boy not that much older than Jeb himself.

"It's not like we threatened him, or something," Fitzalan groused, mock-insulted.

"Well, we do look like the worst kind of butchers," the captain of the Royal Guard conceded, still grinning.

The other man gave him a very odd look.

"Fancy you would say that, Cain," he muttered under his breath, striding forward to secure the unconscious man.

Jeb followed suit. "Oh, yeah? And why …?"

Crouching next to the stunned Alchemist's legs, he looked up with a start, into the shocked eyes of the other captain who seemed to realize his slip of tongue at the same time as the former rebel realized his.

"You know?!" he asked alarmedly.

"I've known from the moment I saw you in the camp," Fitzalan gave back tersely. "I've seen your face before. I also know the general knows you, and vice versa, and I knew that if General Zero decides to call a truce with Jeb Cain, of all people, it's not my business to interfere."

Doglike trust in your superiors was a wonderful thing, Jeb decided promptly, as long as it happened to other people. _But, speaking of the old bastard_ , "You think, Zero knows you know?"

The young engineer considered it for a moment, and then gave another short bark of laughter. "You bet, he knows. He told me to give you a chance, in front of everyone he told me to give you a chance. And quoting Anjil, too. I can't believe it!"

"Believe what? That Anjil knows, too?"

"Definitely not," Fitzalan said with a tone of absolute conviction. "That man has a tendency to ask for forgiveness instead of permission. And you're not exactly popular with him."

Colossal understatement, the former rebel was sure. _Which doubtlessly brings us back to the original question:_ "What exactly makes it so damn weird if I say _'butcher'_?"

The grey-eyed man raised a sardonic eyebrow. "Given your reputation, what do you think?"

Male pride wrestled with itself for a moment. "What reputation?"

"Butcher of the Southern Woods," the Longcoat captain replied promptly.

"What?!" Even as the disbelieving question left his mouth, the captain of the Royal Guard had a very bad bad feeling that he knew where this was going.

An elaborate shrug. "That's our nickname for …," Fitzalan started to explain, before Jeb cut him off.

"Someone who nails people on trees? Zero told me about that. Wasn't me!" the former rebel snarled.

The engineer cocked his head to the side, thoughtfully. "Ah. That would explain some things."

_Like what?_ Jeb refrained from asking. He was too busy berating himself for not having realized _a lot sooner_ that Zero was hardly likely to _not_ have shared his murderous– if erroneous – assumptions with the general Longcoat populace. Like, _before_ he had followed the older man into the middle of an army!

Shoving the gloomy thoughts aside, the former rebel decided that it was high time for a change of topic. "Speaking of explanations, what exactly was that thing you threw at the clean-up crew? 'Cause we both know Zero has very few restrictions when it comes to killing people, and _when_ he objects, it's probably for a _very_ good reason."

Concentrating abruptly on the task of securing their prisoner, the young engineer replied evasively. "If you ever come across something that looks like a pale green marble, three times overgrown, do not break it, at any cost.

And I mean _any cost_ ," he caught Jeb's eyes for a moment, for emphasis, "jumping in front of a bullet heading its way would count as a very good idea, for instance. If you take a closer look – which I wouldn't recommend! – you'd see that it is hollow and filled with something neither liquid nor a gas, shimmering with a peculiar form of opalescence. I don't know what exactly the composition is, but I know that if you break the surrounding sphere, the substance inside will melt the skin and flesh right off your bones."

He threw a pointed look at the heavy leather coat Jeb was wearing at his insistence. "It eats through leather, too, but that gives you a few seconds headstart."

The young captain of the Royal Guard stared at his Longcoat counterpart incredulously. "And you carried one of those things in your pocket? Are you fucking insane?!"

The other young man drew himself up, stung. "With the proper precautions, naturally."

Unconvinced, Jeb shook his head, but the legs starting to twitch before him turned his concentration elsewhere. With their prisoner secured, the two young captains went on to explore the machine hall further.

They found the second Alchemist beyond the gigantic roll of corded metal which Fitzalan identified as the outside of the ventilation tunnel. This time the pale man's reaction to their approach was much more restrained, since he never saw them coming.


	19. Get back

Jeb Cain was itching for a bath as he rarely had in his life, but the sight of all those hardened Longcoats taken aback was _soooo_ worth it.

A very childish sentiment, true, but after having listened to people calling him _Boy_ for two days straight, the young man felt entitled to a bit of childishness.

The guards at the gate gave him rather discomfited stares, but pointed him into the right direction, and then he was treated to the rare pleasure of seeing not only high-and-mighty General Zero but even tough-as-nails Major Anjil do a double-take at his approach.

The young captain of the Royal guard snapped off a picture-perfect salute, sending dark droplets everywhere – a steady drizzle had started outside, turning the dried gore he was still covered in back red and runny.

"Captain Fitzalan's compliments, sir," he told the staring Longcoat officers. "He has found an alternative route into the mine that should lead straight to the main generator room. With your permission, sir, he would like to take some men down there and wreak a bit of havoc."

The general shut his mouth with a click of teeth, gave the young man a glare that promised dire retribution if there wasn't a _very_ good explanation to follow and ground out, "Report!"

The recollection did what the glare hadn't managed and sobered Jeb up.

"The ventilation shaft was protected by a mechanism superficially similar to the booby-trap over there, sir," he nodded at the blown-out console. "Except that this time the magnetic device was custom-built to turn an entire section of the exhaust tunnel into a horizontal whirlwind of shrapnel. There were …" _walls and ceiling dripping red,_ "… three survivors: the captain, another soldier who was gravely wounded and myself. Not expecting _any_ survivors, the Alchemists sent out two men to dispose of the remains."

Zero's expression had not grown any friendlier. The harsh glint in Anjil's eyes was even worse, though.

"They aren't still alive, are they?" the short major asked.

"No, sir."

"A pity. Go on."

"The captain and I found the tech room they had come from, secured the two Alchemists left and explored. The room is located atop the first chimney shaft and …"

"First what?" The prospect of live prisoners had slightly pacified the major, but Zero's scowl had merely changed from _someone's going to die for this, slowly and painfully_ to _someone's going to die slowly and painfully if I don't get a straight-forward explanation, now!_

"Chimney shaft, sir," Jeb explained, knowledgeable only because the young engineer had described his find in exhaustive detail – possibly with exactly such queries in mind. "At first the mine was supplied with air solely through the main shaft. Then, when the tunnels got longer, ventilation became too bad and a vertical chimney shaft was dug out at the furthest end and connected to the slanted auxiliary shaft that we entered. Then the mine expanded again, and when the air circulation got too bad again, the slanted shaft was extended and a new chimney shaft sunk at the end of it. And so on. Every time a new chimney was put into use, the old ones were blocked, but the Alchemists reopened the shaft. They ran both the power lines supplying the machinery on top through it, and a small cargo lift."

_That_ cheered up the general, too. "How small?"

"It's counterweight-driven. Captain Fitzalan estimates that the brakes should be able to cope with the weight of up to a dozen men at a time."

"Delivery time?"

"Around fifteen seconds, one-way, sir. If the counterweight is another platform, which it would be the most reasonable arrangement, about three runs a minute should be possible."

Oo oo oo oo oO

Waved aside while the officers started juggling troops to decide who would guard the main shaft and who to send down into the underground compound, Jeb, once again, found the big sergeant's hand gripping his shoulder.

Wordlessly, Heawl led – all but _dragged_ – the young man to a horse trough filled with water and released him with a shove that almost had him take a header into the trough – an outcome Jeb wasn't actually too opposed to. He had pretty much intended to do exactly that, if a little more controlled, and proceeded to, gratefully, plunge his head into the water. He was trying to rinse off the worst from the coat before the big man spoke up.

"Hope you enjoyed your little show, boy," the sergeant rumbled, "'cause as long as you're wearing that coat, you won't get away with that sort of thing, again."

_Now, that will hamper me for a substantial portion of my life – NOT!_

"Sorry, Sarge," the young captain mumbled dutifully.

"No, you're not." Heawl shook his head. "You're still so sky-high from having survived that it feels like a great idea to stick it to all those who tried to keep you out of the really deadly fights."

Equal parts taken aback and annoyed, Jeb shook the dripping hair out of his face. "I don't …"

"Don't interrupt me, boy!" that was full out sergeant-to-rookie-soldier bark, with the glare to match, but then the big man grinned, without humor. "Not that that worked out so well, huh? But in any case, after that little stunt of yours, don't expect anyone to keep your head out of the line of fire, anymore."

With that admonishment – _warning?_ – delivered, the sergeant turned on his heel and left, leaving Jeb to get back to halfway presentable by his own devices.


	20. Down

Some six to seven seconds freefall, then about the same amount of time for slowing down, the young engineer had explained. Jeb Cain watched the cables supporting the cargo platform race out, counted silently and caught the muted whine of brakes engaging within the narrow chimney shaft right on time.

Zero had prohibited Anjil and Jeb from boarding the first ride, in case the Alchemists had some nasty surprises installed that Fitzalan had not taken into account; but when the counterweight platform appeared, nothing even remotely like the substantial explosion, that the explosives carried by the first load should have produced if hit by some significant force, sounded up the well.

The platform was barely secured when the young captain of the Royal Guard, together with an assortment of scouts under the lead of Major Anjil, piled aboard. Ten in all, since no matter what the brakes might have borne, the small cage of the lift did not fit any more.

Freefall felt exactly as it sounded like. Bottom dropped out under them, they plummeted into the dark abyss for half an eternity, before the brakes engaged with a banshee shriek amplified by enclosing rock and a giant's fist rammed the floor into Jeb's knee joints. Darkness abruptly gave way to blinding light and with a final jerk they hit the ground, in a secluded niche carved into the wall of a gigantic cavern.

The noise was deafening. The former rebel stepped past the bodies of an Alchemist and two goons, and found himself in a vast hall full of generators – the same sort as built into the Witch's Tower, they were a piece of machinery he recognized.

The group spread out as per previously given orders, three men left, three men right and three down the middle; with Jeb as the odd one out tagging along with the right-hand group – and the major.

The young captain kept his eyes open for further opponents and a good spot to deposit the load he was carrying. He found an unmined generator near the closest wall and slapped the explosives to the back of the bearing box where the shaft left the turbine, a good place to let the machine's own power help to tear it to pieces when the charge went up.

_Just like old times._ And speaking of old times, it was _way_ too easy to fall in with Anjil's scouts. They all carried guns – Jeb hadn't let go of his since that desperate scramble in the smoke – but, like the former rebel, they preferred more noiseless weapons. Simply by watching them move, he could tell that their way of fighting was closer to what came natural to him than the more formal way he'd struggled to adjust to since donning the Royal uniform.

The short major held up a hand and Jeb froze unthinkingly, then anticipated, just as automatically, the next move and flowed forward in step with the other men. Only when he caught Anjil's self-satisfied grin, did the young captain of the Royal Guard realize what he had done.

There was no time to mull about that, though. A pair of men from the first run were pointing out some two dozen goons aligned against one of the sidewalls, with a good view of the entrance gate they needed to secure.

The lone Alchemist in charge took Anjil's knife to the throat and then the slaughter began. Being outnumbered four to one called for a quick and vicious attack, and the Longcoats were in no mood to take prisoners, anyway – they had marched down a tunnel with the stench of blood and burnt flesh blowing steadily into their faces, and Major Anjil himself had waded down a bit further – but the goons didn't move a finger to fight back. Eventually, their motionless submission gave even the most vengeful soldiers pause.

"Hold!" the short scout leader stopped his increasingly hesitant men.

He waved his bloodied knife experimentally in front of the nearest of the few still breathing goon's eyes, got no reaction, sliced across the grey-clad man's throat without eliciting as much as a flinch, and finally jabbed the blade deep into the goon's neck, severing the major blood vessels. The man bled out without acknowledging his presence, or indeed any reaction to the injury until his eyes rolled up.

Anjil watched the goon slide down the red-smeared wall with an expression of disgust, then gave the order to, "Secure the rest!"

And then he pointed an accusing hand – still holding a dripping blade – at Jeb. "Why don't they fight back, like the ones upstairs?"

_Why ask me?!?_

"Nobody told them to?" the former rebel ventured. "The general and I found a sort of storage room where they were stacked up like firewood – must have been a couple of hundreds, all waiting for a Alchemist to come and order them to get up."

The young man shook himself at the memory. "Bet, the first order they get after getting turned into … _this_ is to keep breathing until further notice."

The short major – and everyone else around – stared at Jeb for a moment. There was a mutter that might have contained the word _general,_ but as unintelligible as the words were, the tone was unmistakably one of protective fury.

Major Anjil broke the spell by wrenching a piece of cloth violently from one of the dead, to clean his weapon. Then he went to kick the dead Alchemist. "Fucking bitch should have drained him!"

_Huh?_ The older man caught Jeb's confused look at the non sequitur, and elaborated. "The Sorceress was a fickle girl, in the first few annuals."

_Huh, indeed._

Noting the increasing bemusement, the scout leader went on, "Don't give me that look, boy, the Anti-Sunseeder was just her newest craze. Before that, her interests changed several times, and with it her favorites among the Alchemists. Once she wanted better equipment for her army, then ways to reach different places or even times, and so on. These guys here must be relics of the _improve the army_ phase – which was great, at first, by the way. The rubber boys came up with some pretty nifty weapons – most of them not quite so useful out in the field, but in a world of perfect logistics they would have been fantastic. Only then someone messed up and the Sorceress banished the head honcho and his crew and went for something else. She'd better drained the bastard, there and then."

_No objections here_.

"How long have they been down here, you reckon, sir?" the former rebel asked cautiously. Six cycles would have been bad enough, but who knew what the Alchemists might have come up with if they'd had several annuals.

The stocky major bared teeth in a humorless grin.

"Worst case: almost a decade," he gave back grimly, obviously thinking along similar lines.


	21. Appraisal

* * *

Five minutes, one _'foothold secured'_ message and over a hundred men transferred later, the lift precipitated Captain Fitzalan into the generator hall.

The young Longcoat officer ran a quick survey of the premises, with eyes that obviously belonged to the engineer and not the soldier – skimming over places Jeb Cain had eyed warily and focusing on others that held no particular interest to the young captain of the Royal Guard. Then Fitzalan ordered about half of the charges moved from various machine parts and set against the back wall.

"The compound is primarily hydropowered, just as the Tower was," the grey-eyed captain explained when Major Anjil demanded a reason, "with significant water pressure right behind this wall. If we collapse the barrier, the whole mine will flood."

While replanting explosives under the engineer's supervision, Jeb used a momentary lack of audience to question the other captain what he had meant with, " _just as the Tower_."

Fitzalan gave back the sort of _duh_ look DG occasionally garnered when she announced her discovery of yet another completely ordinary O.Z. fact.

"Those large ducts at the base of the Tower," the young engineer said, slowly, carefully, "what did you think they were meant to be? Easy entrance for subversive elements? They are spillways. During snowmelt, or when the generators aren't running at full power and consuming huge amounts of cooling water, the surplus is drained out through there."

Seeing how that piece of information did nothing to resolve Jeb's confusion, Fitzalan launched into a lengthy explanation of the fact that the Tower had been erected atop a gigantic artesian well, whose strong current had been harnessed to provide for the majority of the construct's energy needs. Only for peak demands – such as the Anti-Sunseeder – additional generators were necessary.

The exhaustive lecture worked its own magic, too, keeping all prospective listeners at a distance. Unable to escape since he had started the whole thing, the young captain of the Royal guard soon only listened with half an ear, until a casual half-sentence brought him up short.

"Wait, wait, what? What do you mean, _three cycles, at the utmost?!_ " the former rebel cut in abruptly.

The Longcoat captain gave him another rather exasperated look. "Continuous lack of sunlight causes a sharp decrease in temperature, down to and below the freezing point of water – or in other words, a premature, severe and lengthy winter. According to the best estimates, after three cycles the tributaries feeding the well would have been frozen to the point where the excessive energy demands of the Anti-Sunseeder could not have been met any longer. As the resonance was far from self-sustaining, the syzygy would have collapsed naturally and …"

There had to be a punchline, somewhere, 'cause this was quickly turning into the world's darkest – pun intended – joke.

"You're trying to tell me that _permanent darkness_ would have lasted three cycles, tops?" Jeb ascertained incredulously.

Fitzalan stared at him, open-mouthed.

"You really thought us to be such …" the young engineer gestured emphatically, his entire, impressive vocabulary suddenly inadequate, "…utter fools?!"

For a few tense seconds _both_ young men seemed to wait for a punchline, then the grey eyes turned pure granite. "I understand it's much easier to kill if you convince yourself that the enemy is not human. I did not realize your convictions ran so deep, Cain."

"What?!" _How did **that**_ _come up, now?_

"Humans die in permanent frost and darkness," the Longcoat captain hissed, grabbed the front of his black coat and continued, "and _this_ does not make us any less human. Some of the Alchemists might get so hyper-focused on their work that potential side-effects of their experiments won't register, but most of those in charge and certainly _the entirety of High-Command_ had enough brains to determine that eternity is a very long time to spend in darkness."

A deep breath and a conscious effort schooled the young engineer's features into cold professionalism. "The Witch might have dreamed of permanence, but none of her _human_ ," a sneer of utter loathing, "henchmen was going to deliver that; while the Sorceress was human, too, and quite satisfied with an eclipse feeding her power continually for three cycles on end, and scaring the rest of the Zone into submission."

His biting statement delivered, Fitzalan wheeled and stalked off. Jeb stared after him, focusing on the long, black uniform coat to convince himself that it didn't feel like he'd just smashed something precious.

"You scared off Fitzalan in full lecture mode," Anjil's silky voice interrupted his brooding, with a touch of admiration in his tone that didn't quite mask the edge hidden underneath. "How did you manage _that_ , Graham?"

"Not sure, sir. Somehow," the helpless shrug was not truly an act, "I must have told him he's not actually human. He, uh, took that personally."

Oo oo oo oo oO

The generator hall had all the explosives relocated to their proper places by the time General Zero descended into the underground compound as well.

Tagging along with Major Anjil – he was obviously _not_ hiding behind the much shorter man – Jeb joined the fringes of the growing knot of reporting officers while Captain Fitzalan was giving his report – and was promptly greeted by an icy glare from the other captain.

Zero's eyes flickered momentarily from one young captain to the other, but otherwise the general ignored the byplay.

The stocky major, on the other hand, developed a worrying frown – Jeb had not forgotten Fitzalan's assessment of the scout leader's likely reaction to his true identity, and had realized less than a minute after the fact that he had inadvertently managed to seriously piss off one of the two persons around with the means to reveal said identity. One word from the captain to the major and Jeb would consider himself lucky if he _accidentally_ stumbled into one of the nearby running turbines – Anjil was scarily good with a knife.

The general recaught his attention with his appraisal of the situation. "Drown them all like rats? Tempting. But let's keep that option open for later. I'd prefer to take the compound as it is."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Warning, author rant ahead. Reading not absolutely necessary to understand the rest of the story.
> 
> I really enjoy watching Tin Man, not the least because the bad guys aren't simple cardboard villains but get their little scenes of humanity, too (all except the Alchemists, interestingly), in the form of the occasional disconcerted looks or very humane interactions _among their own side._ Someone made good use of humankind's depressing tendency to act like real bastards towards members of some _outside group,_ which shows up even among those people whose friends and family would swear are really decent guys/gals, normally. Depressing from a fellow human's point of view, that is; for a writer with a penchant for alternative POVs, it's a godsend.
> 
> Ahem, back to the story. Zero gets introduced as the snarky second-in-command of an Obviously Evil army (fashion sense, people!), but one who asks the Sorceress if she's alright when she goes all spacey. He also, in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, steps forward to catch his predecessor's falling body right before he gets his promotion to general, an act that seems to be pure gut reaction if the expression of shock on Zero's face is anything to go by. And if your gut reaction is to catch the man next to you when he's falling, you can't be completely evil. That's before we see the time loop, mind you, or the rest of his overall bastardry – hard to get rid of first impressions .…
> 
> Another example would be that pair of guys in the Ice Palace who grab the Sorceress and pull her out of range when faced with the explosion of some magical item – never mind the fact that she's the person most likely to survive a magical explosion in the room – because she's still their queen and they are her goddamned bodyguards. Or that bunch of guys sharing some (moving?) picture .… I could go on.
> 
> Therefore, that _permanent darkness_ scheme really, really bugs me! The Anti-Sunseeder would be a wonderful tool for any Big Bad commanding an army of orcs or other otherworldly creatures that thrive in darkness and fear the sun, but when your reign is built on the support of standard issue humans .… Dumb, really dumb idea.
> 
> The only thing dumber (literally in the _too dumb to live_ category) would be to keep supporting such a plan in full knowledge of the facts. With Vy-Sor studying blueprints, and Zero being knowledgeable of little details up to and including the _name_ of the brain controlling the machine – and I can't see him sitting down for an in-depth briefing on the topic in the few hectic days he spends as a general – the upper echelons, at least, know exactly what is going on. Since you better don't get a panic among your own massed-up troops, I'll even assume _every_ officer has enough facts to keep the rank and file reassured.
> 
> Historically, people have followed their leaders into some pretty self-destructive situations, but nothing as extreme as eternal darkness; consequently, I must assume that the Longcoats were told something that DG – and the audience – was not.


	22. Know

For the first few tunnels the attack went well, but then the Alchemists managed to spread an alarm and the advance bogged down. And Jeb Cain suddenly gained a new appreciation for the difficulties his father and his comrades-in-arms had faced during the Tin Men's Last Stand. Urban warfare _sucked._

And this was not even urban warfare. On the plus side, there were no civilians getting underfoot to muddle things up; but on the other hand, walls, floor and ceiling were predominantly carved from solid rock, so every shot fired that didn't lodge itself inside a soft body went ricochet, often in a spray of sharp shrapnel. Long, straight, almost coverless main tunnels became shooting galleries for everyone not trying to get down the aisle, while every few yards side doors branched off, opening into rooms that had to be cleared one by one.

Unsurprisingly, Major Anjil was leading one of the task forces clearing the side rooms; Jeb unobtrusively attached himself to that group. The stocky major made no comment.

Zero himself had resolved the previous tension – in his typically highhanded fashion – by twin glares and an infuriating tone of exasperation.

"I have no time for your juvenile disputes. _You,_ " a sharp jab at the young captain of the Royal guard, "will apologize. _You,_ " the black-gloved hand had indicated the grey-eyed engineer, "will stop moping."

Judging by the other captain's reaction, the older man might have just as well slapped him. Fitzalan had gone white, then red, and generally seemed to freeze up under the rebuke, so Jeb had taken the initiative.

"I still have no idea what set you off, but I didn't mean to," was both the truth and as close as he would ever get to apologizing, and if Zero wanted to get any more parental on him, the old bastard was just out of luck.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Most of the rooms they searched were not particularly interesting, but two stuck in Jeb's mind. No, three, actually.

The eight-man search team had made their way down a couple of hundred yards of tunnel, and was presently running last checks through their latest target, when the barrage outside began.

A stray shot hit the edge of the doorway and the resultant jet of stone splinters tore the face off the man standing watch at the entrance. He fell, gurgled for a moment and went still before anyone had crawled over to him.

Of course, someone crawled over to him nonetheless. When the second scout started to rummage around inside the fallen man's jacket, Jeb thought at first that he was checking for a pulse – to reach for the man's throat would have yielded nothing but sticky fingers, at the moment – before realizing that he was actually patting his dead or dying comrade down.

Offended for reasons he didn't want to look at too closely, the young captain of the Royal Guard turned at Major Anjil, to find the short man watching the scene grimly but obviously with approval. His search concluded, the second man shook his head at the major, took a moment to rearrange the dead man's clothes properly and took cover against the wall clear off the entranceway with everyone else, to wait for a lull in the onslaught.

Since no one else seemed to think the incident in any way peculiar, Jeb pushed it to the back of his mind, into the box labelled ' _When I have time for this'_ and concentrated on the situation at hand.

Once – and only once – the former rebel leader had managed to trick two groups of Longcoats closing in on his band of rebels into opening fire at each other and slipped away in the ensuing chaos. Ducking from a crossfire was much less satisfying when there actually was a side he wanted to win.

Anders, a graying scout that Jeb remembered to have seen in the very first infiltration team, returned from a belly-crawling glimpse into the corridor outside to report that a compact mass of "Greys" had emerged from the sixth door back on the opposite side of the tunnel.

Major Anjil had a few choice words to say about a man called Koban, who had apparently been charged with checking out that particular side room, and had previously declared as safe and empty what was now proven to have another, hidden entrance. One that had suddenly disgorged a sizable goon attack force at the back of the frontlines – and at the back of the clear-out crews. If not for the continuous stream of soldiers from the generator room – Zero seemed to be willing to commit his whole army, the way he poured men down the chimney shaft – the combination of the element of surprise and the expanse of clear lines of fire would have chewed up most of the invaders before anyone realized the threat.

Anders patiently waited for the major to run out of air, then told his commanding officer, "Spare your breath, sir, Koban's dead. His whole troop is, took the first volley full to the back, by the looks of it."

Anjil was vociferously displeased about this fact, too.

When the hailstorm of gunfire started to die down outside, the short major risked his own survey and watched the last of the sneak attack crumble with grim satisfaction on his face. Then he shouted at the commanders of the Longcoat contingents on both sides of the mound of grey-clad bodies for clearance before leading his men out into the main tunnel.

The next ten minutes Anjil's search team – and all of the others still alive – rooted for a way to block the doors of already explored rooms. Jeb found a container filled with massive spikes, someone else a box of wedges, and so on.

The following ten minutes were spent to hammer the doors securely shut.

Oo oo oo oo oO

The second room got stuck in Jeb's mind before he even entered.

Troop lined up symmetrically on either side of the door, Anders cautiously tried the lock, jimmied it open with enviable skill – lock-picking was an art Jeb had never quite gotten the hang of – and yanked the door open violently. Major Anjil turned from back to the wall to facing through the entrance in one smooth motion, gun held ready – a maneuver practiced for all the other doors as well, with slight variations of who took which position.

This time, Jeb had placed himself firmly one step behind the stocky major.

Who took one look into the room, recoiled, jabbing an elbow into Jeb's guts that got through his guard because the young man didn't expect the attack, and slammed the door in everybody's face.

Eyes still fixed on metal-bound wood, Anjil snarled, "Scriabin special. Now!"

The words held no meaning to the young captain of the Royal Guard; the tone, however, instilled a sudden urge to run.

Those who had known the major longer seemed to be not much better off.

"Sir?" came a very cautious query.

"I don't care where or how, just get one!"

Two of the men scurried away. Anjil watched them go, then held out a hand. Anders gave his leader a sharp look, before slapping a battered tin flask into the waiting hand.

Somewhat disbelieving – and not a little worried – Jeb watched the short major knock back about half of the contents of the flask – whose smells made the young man's eyes water, from three steps away.

Some endless minutes later, the two men returned with a heavy bundle between them – and a scowling general in tow.

"What is in there?" said general demanded to know.

"You don't want to know. I don't want to know," the short major gave back, raised the flask in a mock-salute and knocked back the rest of its contents. "Some things just need burning."


	23. Stockpile

Another two side corridors down, and Jeb Cain found something to take his mind off the ominous room behind them – now a red-hot pile of rubble, the first five to ten feet of ceiling having cracked and collapsed on top of the roaring inferno that had actually _sucked_ the door off its hinges at ignition.

"Ozma's fucking tits!" he heard one of the men behind him, voice filled with wonder.

Crudely expressed as it was, the former rebel could relay to the sentiment. When Major Anjil told him to, "Run along, boy, tell the general we have found him a treasure trove," he tore his eyes away from the sight with great reluctance.

The Royal Armory was in for a run for its money.

Oo oo oo oo oO

By the time he returned with General Zero, Major Anjil awaited them with the expression of a tomcat beside an empty jug of cream.

"Sir, may I present Master Kvirik, the Record Keeper of Arms Technology." With a grand gesture the stocky man indicated a middle-aged Alchemist, who, despite the armed Longcoat on either side, looked rather more distracted than intimidated.

The general raised an eyebrow. "I see. He is being cooperative, I hope?"

"Quite so, sir – in a manner of speaking." Zero scowled, and the major went on quickly, "He's the, uh, hyper-focused sort, sir – like Master Persen, if you remember. I doubt he's consciously aware that the Eclipse has already passed."

The two officers shared a significant look.

"He is very helpful, as long as he acknowledges your presence at all," Anjil continued.

The general gave a short nod, the scout leader gestured sharply and one of the guards pushed the prisoner forwards. The pale man blinked owlishly at the gold braid adorning Zero's shoulder.

"General," the Alchemist started, sounding somewhat dubiously. "I expected someone … older."

The Longcoat general gave him a measured look – far more tolerant than Jeb would have thought possible – before replying. "My predecessor, General Lonot. He … retired a good half annual ago."

"Ah." Kvirik nodded absentmindedly. "Well. I suppose, now that you are here, you would like to get an overview of the stocks?"

Zero liked. In fact, he insisted on a guided tour.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Row upon neatly stacked row of shelves were filled to capacity with weapons of every kind Jeb could imagine – and a few he hadn't dreamed of before. There were plenty of guns – including some of the biggest caliber he had ever seen as something hand-held, complete with a stabilizing harness that encased the wielder's arm up to the shoulder in metal to compensate for the recoil. Also grenades in every form, shape or color – gunmetal, copper, or _glass_ – plus an entire gallery of rockets that were probably not meant to provide colorful entertainment. The young captain of the Royal Guard had no problems identifying the flamethrowers, either – not that his latest run-in with that particular weapon had endeared it to Jeb in any way. Then there were things that looked nearly like flamethrowers, but not quite, and things he could not identify in the least.

However, since he was merely the tagalong errand boy at the back of the tour given to General Zero, Jeb couldn't very well ask impertinent questions, and Zero showed little interest in the more exotic avenues. The general wanted to see the weapons employed. Consequently, his questions focused on numbers, munitions, readiness to be issued and ease of use.

The Alchemist's bemusement at the sudden raid was countered with, "unexpected developments that require immediate attention," which seemed to satisfy the pale man, especially when his worries about the lack of preparation time were met with the reassurance that Zero would supply any personnel necessary to actually handle the distribution.

All in all, the tour went along quite amiably, even if the general once reached over, grabbed the collar of the smock and shook the Record Keeper bodily, to shake Kvirik out of a long-winded explanation of some complicated gizmo the Alchemist was particularly enamored with – Zero's warning glare having harmlessly bounced off the pale man's focus on technical details over people.

"And in here we store our specialties, General." At the very back of the spacious hall, a small side room had been partitioned off by a tightly sealing metal door.

The Alchemist imperiously commandeered two of the accompanying soldiers into pulling the heavy construct aside – completely oblivious to the questioning looks and consenting nods exchanged behind his back.

In the narrow space beyond, the shimmering green – and amber and magenta, at the very ends of the lines, but mostly green – spheres covered the entire wall, arrayed in transparent, metal-bound tubes like exotic strings of pearls.

When the young captain of the Royal Guard tried to gauge the general's reaction, he found Zero's face turned into an icy mask, the lips compressed into a bloodless line.

"Is this the entire stockpile? Or is there another storeroom somewhere else down here?" the general asked after a moment. From the sound of it, Jeb was pretty sure Zero was forcing the words through clenched teeth.

"Well, of course, there are the experimentation halls," the pale man frowned in thought, quite unaware of the ghastly fire lighting up in Zero's – and Anjil's – eyes at the last two words, "but there should be only sample amounts, no actual stockpiles. The risk of …"

"I am quite aware of the risks!" Greens shimmers reflecting off his eyes and teeth, the irate general spelled danger in a way not even total obliviousness could ignore.

"Which is why you better think through your next answer with exceptional care before you voice it,” Zero went on, menace dripping from every syllable. “ _Is this the **entire** stockpile?!_ If not, if there is even _one_ of those thrice-damned spheres stored outside this room, I want to know where and in whose care. 'Cause if I find any of my men as a pile of brittle bones in a tarry puddle, I'll make you wish it had been _you_ that got eaten by your … _specialties_. Are we clear?!"

Backed against the unmoving wall that was Sergeant Heawl, the pale man nodded hastily. "I will check the logs immediately, General."


	24. Consumption

According to the logs, the entirety of the green menace was locked behind six inches of solid metal – and now guarded by half a hundred _highly_ motivated Longcoats. How much of a calamity this constituted for the rest of the world Jeb Cain had no time to ponder, since Kvirik, in his passion for details, had also pointed out where the substance was _not_ , on a map at the back of the logbook.

When questioned if there were any more maps of the compound around, the Alchemist had pointed out, somewhat tersely, that he was a _Record Keeper_ , so _of course_ there were. As soon as Zero got his hands on a particularly large and detailed one, he and Major Anjil were busily sketching the progress of the assault so far, and Jeb couldn't help but be impressed.

One particular bottleneck seemed to choke further advances, though, and the major was quickly dispatched with a sardonic, "You know the toy box we have now, Major. See what the problem is and solve it!"

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Some fluke of geology had shorn the original ore deposit in two, shifting one piece up and to the side until the two parts were almost edge-to-edge – if not for the good ten yards of vertical difference. The old miners had expanded from the fringes of their previous finds with exploratory tunnels, one of which, by good luck or some arcane method of analysis, had hit the second part of the deposit and had been subsequently expanded into the main – and, by now, only unblocked – connection between the two parts of the mine.

On the map the compound had looked much like a loop-sided hourglass, with the somewhat larger– and as luck would have it, more highly situated – part already in the hands of Zero's invasion forces, except for some tiny pockets of resistance.

The union of the hourglass was, unsurprisingly, the aforementioned bottleneck. In real life, it consisted of a broad, sloped tunnel, running straight towards a right-angled junction at the bottom of the ramp. A middle-aged captain, Jeb couldn't recall having met before, had dug in his forces behind a barricade at the top of the ramp, about halfway between the lower crossroad and the one behind him.

"Get down to that crossing, they come at you from three sides at once, _that_ 's the problem, sir," was his succinct summary of the situation when Major Anjil asked for it.

Before further details could be exchanged, a sharp crack sounded and the tunnel was plunged in darkness up to the next junction behind them.

"Ah, shit! Not again!" the captain swore. "Get the beacon all the way down, this time!"

In the sudden gloom, the former rebel could make out movement among the men to his left and then something shattered on the ground at the bottom of the ramp.

A whoosh, and the lower crossroad was bathed in actinic light, just in time to illuminate the first line of goons approaching from the continuation of the tunnel. They stepped across the burning beacon without a sign of recognition, even when it caught the edges of their clothing alight.

Once ignited, weirdly bluish to pale purplish flames spread faster than they should have, as if the grey cloth was tinder-dry or soaked in some kind of accelerant. The goons marched on without making any efforts to extinguish the flames, blocking off the light from the beacon with their massed bulk, and for a few moments the only illumination was the eerie fire dancing across their burning uniforms.

Mesmerized by the surreal scene, the Longcoats held their fire.

"That's it. Flamethrowers are right out," Anjil said half-loud beside Jeb, and if that wasn't a disturbing comment the former rebel had never heard one. Right now, he could have laughed aloud in hysterical relief, though, since the dry, sarcastic voice broke the spell.

The silent wall of goons on fire had closed in to a mere ten yards before the older captain's men opened fire. The next few minutes were lost in the confusion of a short-way firefight plus melee in the dark; only interrupted by a terrible keening noise when one of the goons, blocked from the actual fighting by the rows of his cohorts before him, had been entirely engulfed by the blaze _and sudden became_ _aware of the fact._

The burning man had just stood there, screaming and clawing uselessly the flames, until Anders had stepped atop the barricade and put a bullet through his head. A moment later, the graying scout toppled backwards with a groan.

When the lights came back, the attack had been repelled and the aftermath could be sorted out without further interruptions. Jeb left the Longcoat officers to their _'problem solving'_ and lent a hand wherever necessary, registering with relief that Anders had yet to stop groaning.

He also decided to use the next available opportunity to get himself drafted among the number of young soldiers that acted as runners for General Zero, relaying his orders and bringing back reports in the extensive tunnel system.

The young captain of the Royal Guard felt it would be safer that way – not necessarily physically, but for his peace of mind. His first reaction to the falling body of the elder scout had been, _Mine! They killed one of mine!_

Not a healthy degree of attachment when the selfsame black-clad men were going to be back on the other side of a war in a day or two. With Zero there was at least no danger that he would grow to like the man.

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The switch of assignments went off without a hitch; Zero merely gave him a measured look, smirked knowingly and sent him off on some errand.

Consequently, Jeb never knew exactly what sort of solution Major Anjil had come up with, but he was sure it was something impressive – the drawn-out roll of muted thunder was audible even from a good dozen tunnels away.

Soon after, the first reports started to roll in, concerning finds from the second part of the compound. Compared to the upper half, mostly containing experiments – and their results – of a more mechanical or technical nature, the research in the lower part pursued a more … _organic_ approach.

As luck would have it, the former rebel was right behind the general when a visibly discomfited soldier brought the news of the discovery of yet another ... _storeroom_.

It wasn't the same room Jeb and Zero had stumbled across before, but one essentially similar. Hundreds of goons, shelved.

Face unreadable, the general had someone fetch him the Alchemist that had been caught nearby.

"How do I take control of those … things?" he questioned the pale man, voice deceptively soft.

"The crucial imprinting phase is triggered by stimuli …" The Alchemist petered off at Zero's well-practiced look of homicidal impatience towards technical mumbo-jumbo.

"In layman's terms, they follow whoever wakes them, unless ordered otherwise," he finished hurriedly.

Zero wasn't the only one to react incredulously. "So, I just march in there, shout, _'Everybody up!'_ and have an army ready to follow my orders?"

"All of them?" the pale man, already in the white-as-a-sheet area given the circumstances, went greenish. He sounded close to hysteria when he continued, "You can't raise all of them at once! It has never been done! They … they would take up all the air, and what would they eat?"

Retrieving his jaw off the floor, Jeb found the general study the Alchemist with a cold smile full of gruesome promises.

"I thought I recognized the smell of preservative vapors," Zero started conversationally. "But no worries, I'm sure I can find a way to … reduce air consumption."


	25. Crack

* * *

Jeb Cain couldn't really fault the general for using the free supply of goons to reduce the casualties among his own men.

Especially, since the goons on the opposite side didn't seem to recognize the grey-clad men approaching them as enemies. Not until they reached the first Alchemists and started killing them.

And even after that, survival rates were still better for Zero's goons, once both sides had figured out – almost simultaneously but independently – that _'March over there and kill anyone not dressed like me'_ was not precise enough an order for such … _literally-minded_ (for lack of a better term) creatures. The resultant free-for-all had been rather chaotic.

Simple human wave tactics were self-defeating in the confined spaces of the old mine, if met by a force whose handlers thought of adding little things like _'take cover'_ to their orders. Which they did, as soon as they realized that certain actions, that would have been no-brainers to the men they usually commanded, weren't part of their new charges' instinctual makeup anymore.

Nonetheless, the young captain of the Royal Guard couldn't – and, actually, had no intention to – shake the feeling that by taking advantage of the poor creatures' lack of will, the general was somehow making himself complicit with the Alchemists that had created them. One puppeteer was as bad as the other if the puppet in question had once been a person, as Jeb saw it.

Judging by the muttering among the Longcoat soldiers trailing the grey-clad masses as a second, more autonomous and therefore even more deadly layer of attack, he wasn't the only one to feel that way. The expression _'ain't natural'_ turned up more than once.

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Discomfiture or not, the unexpected reinforcements allowed the frontline troops to rotate back for a bit of respite more often, something none of the soldiers complained about.

Using the opportunity as well, the former rebel hunkered down in a quiet corner near the goon storage room to grab a few moments of rest, a bite and something to drink. Easily out of sight and yet within hearing, he caught the quiet conversation going on around the corner solely by accident – in the echoing tunnels of the converted mine, noise carried quite far.

"Remember that time, Heawl, when most of what we caught went to the camps? We took in plenty of rebels, then, and yet the number of people in the camps never seemed to change. Always thought they got redistributed among different camps, but now …" a strange, hesitant noise, "… now I'm not so sure."

It was all Jeb could do, not to throw up when the implications hit him.

For a hurt, bewildered child, the two cycles spent in the camps with his mother, after Zero had dropped them off there, had been a nasty experience but one he had gotten over quickly, afterwards.

Thinking back now, however, the young captain of the Royal Guard could recall that there had been some strangely clothed men visiting once, that had then scared him by their … _otherness_ , even though they had not shown any interest in the women and children.

To think that he might have run into Creepy then .…

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Despite the disturbing thoughts and memories roiling through his mind, Jeb found himself drifting off after a while. Not really unconscious but in a state of languid relaxation, the outer world stopped to be of importance.

After an immeasurable amount of time, a far-away noise registered through the haze, but failed to provoke any reaction. An impact against his face stirred up a faint voice at the back of his head that some sort of response might be appropriate.

He blinked unhurriedly – and was promptly slapped for his troubles. He blinked again.

"Focus! Damn you, boy, focus!"

And so he did.

Easily.

The voice, the face looming over him, the fact that Zero had just back-handed him again – everything contracted, first into a sharp point of icy panic, born of old flashbacks, and then one of even colder rage, when more recent memories reminded the former rebel that he was not a helpless child anymore. Adrenaline burned through the sluggish haze.

He struck back – and found his aim woefully off. The shock pushed Jeb the rest of the way to clearness.

Released after his wild flail, he had dropped back to the ground. Now the young captain of the Royal Guard readjusted his balance, took his bearings and rose to glare at the general. "What the hell …?!"

"Finally awake, I see," came back at a drawl, but if Jeb hadn't known better, he would have thought Zero to look relieved.

The older man waved at their surroundings and continued, "Some variant of _Vapors._ Odorless, obviously, and strong enough to get everyone nearby a first-row trip."

Looking around, the former rebel found the tunnel strewn with figures in various poses of relaxation.

Around the next corner, Major Anjil was ambling around aimlessly, beaming beatifically at the walls. He turned around at their approach, sketched a jaunty salute at the man with gold-braid at his shoulder and greeted Jeb with a dreamy smile that looked dreadfully wrong on the usually so deadly focused features.

"My girls are half as old as you," the stocky major told the young captain of the Royal Guard with the earnest solemnity of a five-annual-old, counting off his fingers, "and a little over a third and nearly a quarter."

Jeb stared back without replying. _That's … uh, … nice_ , didn't quite seem to fit the occasion.

Zero grabbed the weaving man by the collar.

"Your girls are dead!" he snarled into the shorter officer's face, "dead and burned!"

For a moment there was no visible reaction, then the short major lunged. The general side-stepped smartly, letting the other man run smack into the wall.

Momentum kept him sliding for a short distance, then Anjil caught himself and turned slowly, face smeared with blood from reopened cuts and fresh scratches.

"Sir?" he asked slowly, burning anger still heavy on his tone, but banked for the moment.

"Welcome back to reality, Major." Zero ignored the simmering rage, waved once more at the surroundings and went on, " _Vapors_ , Alchemist strength. Free trips for everyone."

The tone changed to a commanding one. "Adrenaline still seems to work as a counter. Get as many reliable men awake as you can and prepare to meet whatever comes next."

The major acknowledged the order, shook himself and went one way, while the general – with Jeb in tow – went the other.

His ability to keep calm under pressure had been one – if not _the_ – deciding factor that had put the former rebel leader in command of men twice or more times his age, but now it was working against him. The problem of using adrenaline against an _ongoing_ intoxication was that the moment Jeb got calm enough to think properly, he experienced the urge to sink into a contemplation of the lovely color scheme on the walls.

Maintaining his focus by conscious effort, the young captain of the Royal Guard slapped the pouch still hanging at his hip. "What about gasmasks?"

"Standard filters won't work," was the less than reassuring answer.

"Ah." Then another fact caught in Jeb's fraying attention. "How come that _you_ don't seem to be affected?"

Zero gave him a sidewise, guarded – _almost haunted_ – look. "It _is_ a poison."

With his thoughts tumbling along pathways that made a corkscrew look straight by comparison, the former rebel considered this cryptic statement perfectly clear.

He grinned. "Hope you didn't plan for a victory drink – or twenty – tonight."

The general's following look was more exasperated. "I didn't. And word of advice, boy: Never get drunk if you've had no decent sleep for a couple days beforehand."

The young captain stared, wide-eyed. "That's word for word the thing my father told me," he confided in incredulous amazement.

The look on Zero's face following _that_ statement was so indescribable that Jeb broke into helpless giggles. Helpless enough to take the first slap full in the face, though the stinging pain sobered him up to the point where he could block the second one.

"Whatever thought brought you into focus," the general growled, " _don't_ lose your hold on it again!"

The former rebel didn't. Adrenaline was easy to come by while he watched Zero do what he had done best for as long as Jeb remembered the man: kicking and hitting people until they did as the Longcoat officer commanded.

His hand tightening subconsciously on his weapon with every step, the former rebel slowly started to align it with the general's back before him. When he had had enough, Jeb pulled the trigger – and shot the googly-eyed thing emerging from a crack forming in the hitherto smooth wall behind Zero.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: It's been weeks in RL, but in-story it has been less than 48 hours since Zero had that run-in with the mad viewer. Enough to keep some residual protection against bodily harm, be it mechanic, heat-based or chemical in origin.


	26. Reaction

For the first few seconds of confusion, Jeb Cain wasn't sure what kind of creature he had shot at – or if the thing had indeed been real.

But then there was more than one, all alike, all streaming from the newly-opened cleft in the rock, before they met, rather abruptly, with the natural consequence of having a bunch of heavily armed men hyped up on mixed vapors and adrenaline. At least, the other guys seemed to see them, too.

Then one of the men, who might have been Heawl's younger brother judging by his stature, and who had acquired one of those arm-cannons the young captain of the Royal Guard had admired in the armory, opened up, and whatever number of opponents had still been hidden in the uncharted passageway became a moot point. That thing fired shots that went ricochet three or four times (at minimum) between the close-set stone walls, regardless of the number of bodies packed in-between. Halfway aligned with the narrow tunnel, it …. Well, nothing else made it out into the main corridor but oozing red.

In the lull created by the roar of _that_ weapon, a cursing general picked himself off the floor – either lucky happenstance or damn good timing had allowed the attackers to come up directly behind Zero and the latest victim of his wake-up campaign, but both had hit the ground immediately after the first shot, clearing the lines of fire for the rest of the group.

"When I get back to that damn record keeper, I'm going to make him eat that useless map of his!" the general snarled.

Jeb grinned at the image – probably not an idle threat but funny, nonetheless – thought of the pedantism of the man and proposed, possibly still a bit loose-tongued from the vapors, "Just tell him that his records are faulty. It'll be more painful to him."

Zero growled something unintelligible, then told the former rebel to burn off his obvious excess of energy by clearing the bodies out of the way.

Rolling his eyes, Jeb did so. But it wasn't until he had dragged the topmost body aside, that he realized something odd. They were all oriented in the same direction.

For the first creature, the young captain of the Royal Guard could have believed that it went after the general because the latter had been the first moving target within its – most likely limited – field of vision. For the next half a dozen, with plenty of shots coming from the other side … not so much.

He looked back sharply at Zero – who met his eyes with a faint smirk that told Jeb that the general had already reached the same conclusion. He seemed rather sanguine about it, reminding the former rebel abruptly of an incongruous detail, long forgotten in the intermittent cycles. A hastily scribbled missive that had been found sitting (most likely unread) on the ex-general's desk in the aftermath of the eclipse, reading: _A. called, left this message: Someone's after you – again._

As if reading Jeb's mind, Zero gave him a shrug and an off-hand, "I've had people coming after me since I was about your age, boy. It's nothing new."

Shaking his head, the young captain of the Royal Guard returned his attention to his task.

Once the way was clear, he took a closer look at the body still most in a shape worth of investigation. It had been a goon, wearing a hooded mask and a strange sort of breathing apparatus on his back; the latter was identified by Captain Fitzalan, summoned from somewhere, as, "a type of rebreather, standard mine rescue equipment, actually."

Uncommonly giddy – and thus more Glitch-like than ever, uncannily enough – the young engineer talked a mile a minute, managing for once to get through his entire lecture before the general's patience ran out.

Jeb gathered that the things kept the wearer entirely out of contact with the surrounding air, breathing solely what was trapped within the interior of the apparatus, and provided oxygen by recycling the exhaled air … _somehow_. That part had rushed past a bit too fast.

The missing detail aside, it certainly explained why the goon had still been moving. All unprotected goons, regardless of side, had simply gone to sleep when the vapors reached them, and could not be roused by any means, as first intel trickling back from Anjil's group, which had checked the situation along the previous frontlines, reported.

The other odd thing about the attacker was his weapon. Once he thought it through, the former rebel had to admit that it wasn't odd that he would not have a gun – whose loud report might cause quite the alarm among those not entirely unconscious – but it was still a peculiarly formed blade. Two thirds the length of his arm, broad and heavy and with a wicked hook at the end. The closest Jeb could think of was an old-fashioned farming implement – which, of course, was as much a short-hand for harmlessness as the Papay were.

Zero picked up the curved piece of metal and gave it an experimental swing. The sheer weight of the thing put an awful lot of momentum behind the edge of the blade. A quiet weapon, sure, but one that would paint the walls a lovely shade of red on the backswing.

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A cautious clearing-out of the passageway yielded the next interesting find. Among the shredded remains of about another dozen goons, there were also the bodies of two Alchemists. One of which had obviously dived for the floor just in time, and had used the remains dropping all over him to play dead so authentically that no one noticed the difference, until someone heavy stepped on the body dragged into the lighted main corridor.

Having the personal experience to draw comparisons, Jeb decided that a Zero wearing full uniform while holding a dripping blade and looking down on one, wasn't much more impressive than a half-stripped one.

What made this one much, _much_ worse, though, was the smirk of pure teeth. It denoted a Longcoat general both extremely pissed and in the position to dish out revenge.

No wonder the Alchemist started gibbering at the sight. Or babbling, as the case would be. "It wasn't my idea! It wasn't, I swear it wasn't!"

Zero brought the broad side of the hook up against the cowering man's cheek, no harder than a slap but leaving a sticky smear. The Alchemist nearly choked with terror.

"Try again. What wasn't your idea?" the general said, almost gently, the sharp point of the hook still resting against the edge of the Alchemist's jaw.

It took a few false starts, but the short version was that Master Boure, the Alchemist leader, upon seeing the compound nearly completely overrun and his life's work about to be destroyed, had decided to take things personally.

Unleashing the narcotic vapors into the air intake, regardless of the damage it would do to his own remaining forces, he had then, after what he deemed enough time to put everyone to sleep, sent out the last of his still mobile goons to kill all of the knocked-out intruders – except for the general. The latter one, Boure wanted to be brought back to him.

_Alive._

"Is that so? Well, then it would be impolite to refuse the invitation," was Zero's still smirking reaction.


	27. Evil

Jeb Cain had his doubts if the Alchemists would fall for the same trick twice, and Captain Fitzalan had voiced similar concerns.

The newest Alchemist prisoner had sworn up, down and sideways, however, that Master Boure was of the opinion that the main gate had been surprised solely because the Alchemist in charge of the repair team had been overpowered and forced to order his contingent of goons to comply with the Longcoats' commands. The way the man was shaking with fear, Jeb didn't think the prisoner had the presence of mind to lie straight into Zero's face.

Consequently, the Master Alchemist had taken the precaution of ensuring that this time the goons would follow only _his_ orders, not those of the accompanying Alchemists. That the goons might be replaced by someone else entirely had obviously never entered his thoughts, and Boure was sufficiently convinced of the superiority of his own mental capacities to assume that if he didn't think of something, it wasn't worth consideration.

Given the state of the original troop, not only the goons but also their uniforms and, most importantly, most of their breathing equipment had to be replaced, but armory and generator hall contained enough rebreathers.

The resultant fake task force looked scarily real, the young captain of the Royal Guard had to admit. Grey uniforms splattered generously around the legs, hooded, masked and gripping bloodied blades, they looked very much the part of a troop that had just massacred its way through an army of helpless vapor victims.

Even the visible ill ease of one of the accompanying Alchemists – his clothes covered more than generously with dark fluids – did its part to reinforce the image. The other one, replaced by a roughly equally built substitute and wearing a less obviously drenched uniform, seemed much more composed.

Satisfied with the sight, General Zero gave the order to proceed and then held out his arms. With only minute hesitation, the two foremost 'goons' grabbed him just beneath the shoulders. Zero let himself go limp, and the two men adjusted their grip to his dead-weight with a practiced ease the former rebel couldn't help but notice.

Then they stepped forward and the narrow passage swallowed them.

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Airlock, claustrophobic chamber flushed with ear-popping pressure differentials and another airlock – Jeb was beginning to suspect that the narrow tunnel had led them inside the massive construct surrounding the main shaft.

Beyond the second airlock awaited a metal-lined room and a greeting voiced in a familiar detached tone. "I see the retrieval has been successful."

Even blinkered by the hooded mask, the young captain of the Royal Guard could see the general stiffen up at the sound. He seriously doubted that the older man was as accomplished an actor as to fake the blood draining from his face, but wasn't so sure about the feeble squirm. The Alchemist definitely seemed to buy it, though.

"You may observe the action of adrenaline as a counter-agent," Creepy continued to comment, finally stepping into Jeb's restricted field of vision. "As the subject has been conditioned to fear me, mere auditory stimulation is sufficient to trigger the release."

 _That … sounded ominous_.

The Alchemist frowned slightly before he went on. "Subject Z shows remarkable resilience to Agent 752, though, processing of auditory input is usually incapacitated at this dose. I wonder …"

Zero's fight with gravity to lift his head was definitely an act, but a good one.

"Combat nerves," the general ground out, through clenched teeth. "Plenty of adrenaline. You'd know, if you'd ever seen a battle close up."

For the first time since Jeb had met the man, Creepy lost his cool. The detachment was markedly gone from his tone when he said, "Conscious and aware already, remarkable indeed. As are your destructive tendencies, Subject Z. You cannot even begin to fathom what irrevocable damage you have caused, a decade's worth of research all …"

"Spare me the rhetorics." Zero put his feet under him and his two 'captors' automatically adjusted their grip again. "What do you want?"

"Disruptive to the end. At least, you are consequent in your willful ignorance. Well, then, _what I want_ is to terminate my experiment properly, before I relocate." The Alchemist held out his hand imperiously and a pale assistant hastily put a glass syringe into it.

"Papay digestive enzyme," Creepy announced edifyingly. "Injected into a major vein, it ought to become systemic before the level of denaturing proteins exceeds the threshold of coagulation. It will then dissolve all soft tissues from the vascular system outward, leaving only bone and keratinous substances, like skin, hair and nails, intact – theoretically. I will take care to observe if the theory is validated."

The former rebel was glad for the breathing mask hiding his features, he doubted he could have kept a neutral face for _this_.

For the first time Creepy smiled, _and damn, if that didn't take **'creepy'** to a whole new dimension! _

"You two, hold him tight!" the Alchemist commanded.

For a split second the two masked men seemed to obey, while the assistant scurried forward to pull back the general's collar and expose the jugular.

Then Zero said, "I don't think so."

Slipping effortlessly out of the 'goons' slackened grip, the Longcoat general's punch folded the assistant up at the middle, before he caught the hand propelling the syringe towards his neck.

For one moment of incredulous surprise, the Alchemist leader simply tugged at the suddenly immobile hand, but though he had a good two inches in height over Zero, the latter obviously led a much more active life. The joined hands didn't budge, at all.

The general waited until Creepy's eyes widened in appalled realization, then twisted the hand in his grip down and to the side, until the needle didn't point towards him, anymore.

"What …" the Alchemist started, before Zero's heavily gloved hand impacted against his face.

" _Disruptive,"_ the general threw back at him, teeth bared in something that wasn't even a smirk anymore, just aggression and satisfaction and a fierce hunger for revenge honed to a razor edge. "You were saying?"

"All of you, get him off me!" Creepy shrieked, ineffectually wrestling with the iron grip keeping him within the black-gloved fist's reach. "Get him off me!"

 _Slap, backhand, slap_ , in one quick motion, silenced him. The alleged 'goons', naturally, hadn't moved, but also the last remaining assistant had taken one look at the irate Longcoat general and cowered against the farthest wall.

The sharp-edged smile widened. "Your experiment seems to have failed, _Master_ Alchemist." The title dripped with disdain.

"I heard you tried to create the perfect soldier." _Punch._ "But what I have seen of your … _creations,_ so far, I must say they couldn't be less of that." _Backfist._

Creepy was starting to bleed, from split lips and battered nose, and Jeb was somewhat irritated to see that the blood was still a very human red.

"The keystone of any army is _loyalty,_ " Zero went on. "Loyalty to their leader, their oath, even the highest bidder – doesn't matter which as long as it is there. The Queen, and especially the Sorceress, had the right idea there, with their binding oaths. You should have built on that if you really wanted _soldiers_.

But you," another brutal jab, "you preferred to create dumb puppets – no _soldiers_ , at all!" The smile was all gone, leaving only the edge.

While the Alchemist still reeled from the last blow, Zero pulled him down until both their hands touched the ground, set his boot on the older man's hand and straightened up, putting his full weight on the forward foot. Thick glass resisted for a moment, and then shattered, sending sharp splinters and yellowish enzyme through the hand that held it.

Standing back, the general watched with icy satisfaction how Creepy clawed panicky at his injured hand, spreading splinters and contagion onto the other hand as well.

"You should be grateful that I have never been a patient man," Zero grimly cut through the screams. "I don't think I'll waste a Viewer on you – especially with so many of my men in need of their services, too."

Applied topically, the enzyme seemed to eat through skin as well – by the time the Alchemist lost consciousness, his hands were little more than bone.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Thanks to the spiteful Alchemist leader taking out his own troops, too, in his bid for revenge, the rest was simply mop up.

Seeing how they knew no fear, no pain, no anger, there was no easy way to revive the drugged-out goons, so Zero had them hauled back into their storage rooms, where the preservative vapors would keep them … _undying_ until another solution presented itself.

Jeb busied himself with the work, partially because it needed to be done, partially because he wanted to be able to say without lying that he had no idea what had happened to Creepy in the end.

But though he had watched pitilessly how the Master Alchemist had had his own poison turned against him – the guy had declassed **_Zero_** to _lesser evil_ within the first minute of acquaintance, and the evidence against him had been mounting ever since, until Creepy made the Longcoat general look like one of the _good guys_ , by comparison – the former rebel still felt slightly ill when he realized that the unconscious goons wore more peaceful, more _human_ expressions than the mobile versions ever had.


	28. Loose

Mop up had wound down about an hour ago, and now Jeb Cain had found himself a quiet corner in the cavernous workshop-turned-impromptu-field-hospital next to the generator hall where he could keep an eye on the quartet of Viewers put to work there.

"There you are, Graham," a soft voice eventually cut the quiet. Face cast in shadow by the bright lights above him, Major Anjil looked down on the young captain of the Royal Guard and shook his head. "Malingering doesn't suit you, boy."

_Malingering?!_ "I'm not malingering!" Jeb snapped back, not bothering with any pretense of deference. "I'm keeping an eye on them!"

The short scout leader followed his outstretched hand and shot him an incredulous glance. "The furballs? They are harmless, boy. They …"

"They. Were. Kept. In. Solitary. Cells! With walls thick enough to muffle every scream!" The sight had made the former rebel leader want to live up to his misapplied reputation. Not even the Alchemists in the Witch's tower had done _that_ to the highly social creatures. The barking mad one he had seen before was in one of the better shapes as a result.

"There was a dozen of those dark, stinking holes, but only four of them left," Jeb went on, burning anger thick in his stomach.

Something dark sparkled in the stocky major's eyes. "I know. I've seen a couple of jars. And a fur rug."

The young captain wasn't even aware he had jumped up, until he felt cold steel slide across his ribcage.

"You bastard!" he spat at the shorter man.

Anjil grinned, black laughter dancing in his eyes. "That's still _'You bastard, **sir**!'_ to you, Graham. And now sit down again, boy, before I make you."

The major wasn't a man that could be fought in a thoughtless rage, especially with his blade already resting coolly against the skin on Jeb's chest, just one twist of the wrist shy of sliding between the ribs, so the young man obeyed.

Anjil followed him down, going into a crouch before Jeb, the knife disappearing back into a sleeve.

"It's not them, boy, not really," the stocky scout leader said softly, waving towards the huddled, fur-covered figures. "They are just the final grain of moritanium that broke the munchkin's back. It's two days of nastiness, all piled atop each other. You're a tough little bugger, to have made it this far without breaking, but now you need to find a way to unwind, and _fast_ , before you do something _really stupid_."

A faint, amused grin.

"Get out, breathe some fresh air. Get drunk on something the Alchemists didn't concoct. _Go, ask the general for an hour alone with one of the prisoners_ …"

Jeb wasn't sure if that last one had really been said aloud, or if it was just an insidious echo of his own thoughts earlier, but judging by the look in the short major's eyes, the latter had picked it up, too, one way or the other. And he considered all three options (or any combination thereof) equally agreeable. _And damn, if_ that _wouldn't take off the edge …_

The young man shook himself. Fresh air sounded real good, right now.

This time, Anjil made no move to stop Jeb when he pushed off the wall.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Going up the plunging elevator was as uncomfortable as going down, only different, but the young captain barely noticed.

There were guards inside the ventilation tunnel, that he brushed off by mumbling something about general's orders he had to relay, but none outside, not until the shelter of the trees.

Dusk had fallen again, the last purples of sunset clinging to the peaks while the valleys were already shrouded in pitch-black shadows. From up the slope, Jeb could make out the unbroken line of lamps and fires surrounding the former mine, but anyone downhill or on the opposite slopes would probably not be able to make out the encampment.

He could have passed right through it in all likelihood, thanks to the coat he wore, to vanish into the nightly wood; his agreement with the Longcoat general fulfilled as soon as the last Alchemist had been secured. To leave this whole mess behind felt incredible tempting.

But Wyatt Cain's son had never been a quitter. And what would have been the point of stumbling blindly through unknown terrain in the darkness, anyway.

He didn't descend towards the camp, though, but skidded carefully over the scree, until he reached an outcropping of solid rock some fifty yards to the side.

A deep cleft between the standing stones, open towards the midday suns but sheltered from the wind, had given rise to a nest of short, thick grasses that felt almost plushy under his touch in the darkness.

The young man rolled up in the cleft, his long coat wrapped around him, and stared into the stars appearing one by one in the darkening sky.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Jeb hadn't meant to stay outside for more than maybe half an hour, but when the clatter of nearby footsteps woke him, the moons above him told him that it was way past midnight.

Annoyed with himself and the world at large, the young captain kept his position quietly, certain that he was undetectable to any passers-by unless they actual stepped on top of him, but to his irritation, the newcomer did just that.

"What are you doing here?" Captain Fitzalan queried, sounding as cross as Jeb felt.

"Major Anjil's exact words were: _get out, breathe some fresh air._ You’ve got a problem with that?" the former rebel snapped back.

The engineer didn't sound much impressed. "Major Anjil also told me that you were about to strangle him with your bare hands. Are you saying I should take him literally on that, too, Cain?"

Jeb honestly couldn't remember where he had put his hands, but they might have been pretty close to the scout leader's throat. "What if I do?"

There was a moment of stunned silence. "You …? Damn! You are really the craziest son of a …"

"Hey! Careful what you say about my mother, man!" Jeb cut the other captain off, angrily, but the older went on without acknowledging the interruption.

"And the luckiest, too, by far. I can't believe …"

Fed off with getting talked down to, the young captain of the Royal Guard picked himself off the ground. " _I_ can't believe you found me. How?"

Wordlessly, Fitzalan handed him an odd pair of goggles. A suspicious look through them showed his own hand, indeed his whole body, glowing faintly with an eerie green luminescence in the moonlight. The same was true for the young engineer.

"Moritanium-heavy dust," the latter explained without prompting. "Everyone who went into the mine is covered with it. As is the closest environs of the ventilation shaft, but fortunately every step on this loose agglomerate disrupts the weathering layers and leaves a recognizable distortion. I simply followed the sole track that veered off sharply from the trail towards the camp, and lead to a distinct phosphorescent rub-off on these rocks."

_Loose agglomerate_ sounded like a good description for the jumble in Jeb's head. Not that that was anybody's business. "And you decided to show off your impressive tracking skills why, exactly?"

The moment he had asked the question, the young captain of the Royal Guard already knew the answer. "The general wants to see you."


	29. Return

One might consider it ironic, but the plunge to the bottom level of the mine – the main elevator was still out, thanks to the Alchemists flooding the space within the metal walls around the floor of the main shaft with … _something,_ Fitzalan wasn't very clear on what exactly, early on in the siege – actually helped Jeb Cain to regain his equilibrium.

Zero, he could deal with – literally. Whatever else could be said about the Longcoat general, he was always good for some (re)action, and it was the things Jeb couldn't _do_ something about that got to him.

Once they were down, the young engineer led him to a nondescript door somewhere in the subterranean maze, but instead of dropping him off after announcement, the Longcoat captain went on to assume a position at the back of his general.

Judging by the size and the quality of furnishings of the room, the latter had acquired Creepy's personal stateroom for his temporary headquarters. Judging by … the guard-dog edginess of his opposite number and the lack of non-knowledgeable listeners in the room, Jeb suspected that this meeting concerned the captain of the Royal Guard and made sure to have a solid wall at _his_ back.

Zero looked tired but triumphant, a successful predator well-sated on its kill. Boots propped atop the heavy wooden desk, he had tilted the matching high-backed chair back at a rakish angle and sprawled into it. In keeping with the generally good mood, he greeted the two young men with a smirk so benign, it almost counted as a real smile.

Then, however, he came right to the point. "Since your presence here provides me with the rare opportunity of direct access to Royal ears, I have a couple of messages I want you to deliver, if you will."

The words were spoken amiably enough, but Jeb could feel the underlying tension beneath the affable façade. The request was reasonable, though, so he nodded cautiously.

The lurking tension uncoiled and the older man grinned for real.

"They call us the _Army of the Damned_ , and while that is very flattering to me," Zero smirked in amusement, "even the damned ones have families. Or at least, a good third of my men have one that they are willing to admit to."

The smirk vanished.

"At the moment any contact would be an unacceptable risk. This, however," he indicated a large packet of envelopes, some of them worrisomely stained and most crumbled, "are the letters of the fallen. Written in the knowledge that they would be sent off only after death, with the intent of providing some form of … farewell. I want your word as an officer that if I give them to you, it won't be to the detriment of the respective families."

Jeb drew himself up angrily. "You know fully well that _we_ …"

"Careful, boy, don't give yourself lie. There may not have been a formally sanctioned policy of retaliation, but we both know that in the aftermath of the Eclipse quite a number of old scores were settled, justified or not. In some areas, there's still no quicker way to draw a mob."

Refusing to be drawn into _that_ discussion _again,_ the young captain of the Royal guard nodded sharply.

"You have my word," he said simply.

Satisfied, Zero nodded back. Then he put another bundle of paper forward. "Now, this missive is mine. It's for the Queen's eyes only, unless you think the real decisions are actually made somewhere else …"

Ignoring the bait dangled in hope of information, Jeb eyed the thick envelope without reaching for it, wondering just how much destructive power an Alchemist-trained Longcoat engineer might be able to pack into so small a space. Enough to kill and maim a lot of people, he was sure.

"What's in there?" the young captain of the Royal Guard demanded to know.

Zero smirked, amusement with a hint of teeth beneath. "A proposition for a ceasefire, in order to negotiate an armistice."

"What?" both captains in the room reacted as one.

"Sir, you can't think of surrendering …"

"Under what conditions? 'Cause I doubt you have a death wish," Zero's jaws tightened at that and Jeb barely kept himself from grimacing at the unfortunate choice of words.

"I don't!" the general bit out, caught himself, grinned crookedly in appreciation of the irony and amended, "usually."

Then he looked with mock-despair from one of the two younger men to the other. "But really, what do they teach young officers these days? Both of you should be aware of the definition of armistice, that is _all fighting ends with no one surrendering_.

And to answer _your_ question," he focused on the captain of the Royal guard, "A repeal of prosecution, for every man who acted under explicit orders from his superior officers, is going to be a major condition."

That sounded innocuous enough, until Jeb realized that Lonot – not to speak of the Witch who _had_ taken the throne and assumed regency – had been Zero's superior until a few days before the Eclipse. "And the Queen would be interested in this deal why, exactly? Since the offer, for all members of the Sorceress's Army to surrender themselves to the rightful Queen's Mercy _,_ stood for a full cycle without you taking it."

The grey-eyed captain seemed at the edge of a fierce retort, the general, however, merely gave a dismissive shrug.

"I had ten annuals and explicitly _all means necessary_ at my disposal and I never managed to get rid of the rebels hiding in the hills." A smirk of personal challenge. "Wanna bet _you_ can do better?"

The young captain of the Royal Guard gave an equally dismissive shrug.

" _We_ had the support of the populace," he pointed out logically.

That smirk was pure triumph. "Who says _I_ haven't?"

_Yeah, sure. Pull the other one!_ Jeb was about voice his opinion aloud, when he caught the self-content look in Zero's eyes, the expression of a man who has no need to bluff because he holds all the cards, including a few you didn't even know were part of the deck. As expressions went, that look was scary as hell.

"You are crazy," the former rebel said instead.

"And you are inexperienced." The general held up a restraining hand when the younger man drew a deep breath to snap back. "At your age that's not an insult, just a fact you have to take into consideration and learn how to work around."

That rankled, but made an unfortunate amount of sense. Jeb held his peace and Zero went on, satisfied. "Allow me to give you a short refresher course in recent history.

You know, I assume, that there are regions who believe that the legitimate Royal bloodline ended with Ozma? To them, one usurper on the throne was as bad as the other. Now, I don't know about the Witch, but the Sorceress always was a Gale to the core. She drafted especially heavily from those particular regions. A number of towns lost almost half their male population to her army and they would rather not lose them to the gallows, now."

The general paused for a moment, all traces of amusement gone from his eyes. "Neither would I. Of course, their support is mostly morally, they don't have much to offer in terms of material, but there are … others. More fortunate places that provide me with supplies, and I provide them with … protection."

"Protection," Jeb repeated, flatly.

A purely predatory grin. "You had a bit of a marauder problem, near Central City, I believe …"

The young captain of the Royal Guard clenched his teeth. He hadn't realized that there was such a thing as disciplined brutality until he had seen the results of _undisciplined_ brutality, a few cycles ago.

Not even capturing Zero had felt as satisfying as hunting down those ex-Longcoats-turned-bandits … _Bastard!_ He glared at the general that had just outmanoeuvred him. "Let me guess, one big predator to scare off all the small ones, kept from attacking by regular sacrifices?"

The older man smirked.

"Protection," he repeated. "Even more lucrative, all things considered, is of course what boils down to politics."

"You have ambitions towards politics?" Jeb gave back incredulously, "that's a new l…"

"Not me!" The general sounded faintly disgusted. "I worked for my rank. But there's quite a number of old and noble houses that observe with great consternation and concern just how many officers of the new Royal Army – not to speak of other influential positions – have been recruited from the common rabble in the aftermath of the Eclipse. Not to speak of substantial portions of the rank and file with _personal_ loyalties to said officers.

Add a Younger Princess that does not quite conform to their expectations of a highborn lady and is very popular among the masses .… Well, they remember that the last time the throne changed hands, it ended up – as it usually does, in such cases – in possession of the princess backed by the army.

So, they find me very useful as a counterbalance – useful enough to turn plenty of blind eyes. They still wish you success in finding me, mind you, but pray for heavy losses _on both sides_ every time your forces ride out to hunt for me. And _you_ , personally, are right on top of the prayer list.

The only thing that they would like even better than your speedy return as a heroic corpse, would be if the two of us managed to kill each other."


	30. New dawn

Jeb Cain knew, of course, that there was quite a number of people frowning at his presence in numerous council sessions – he would have had to be blind, deaf and stupid not to.

So far, however, he had taken the reason for the barely – if at all – concealed displeasure to be his lack of age.

So far, he hadn't cared – _he_ knew he was good at what he did, and so did the people whose opinion mattered to him, and if certain idiots thought that age automatically translated into skill and experience **_and vice versa_** , they were welcome to underestimate him.

This far more sinister reason had not crossed his mind up to now, and while it made sense, Okra's Razor – or whatever the thing was called that DG had unwisely introduced Glitch to – told him that Zero had much to win if he managed to stir up distrust among his opponents.

Unsure how to react and playing for time to think, Jeb settled for a sarcastic, "I'm flattered."

The Longcoat general smirked. "You should be. Poster boy for the common rabble officer, highly popular among the soldiers, very friendly with the Younger Princess while close enough in age to count as eligible … "

The young captain of the Royal Guard did a double-take. "Wait, what?!"

The older man laughed, while Captain Fitzalan gave him a look of such condescension as can only be extended by a young male towards a _slightly younger_ male.

 _Oh, you've got to be kidding me._ If Jeb gave the matter any thought at all, the tomboyish princess was at best something like a sister to him – a younger one, despite the opposite age difference:

Sometimes adorable, sometimes annoying, and very occasionally great fun to get into trouble with. There had been that memorable instance, when the boy who had grown up on the run and the girl raised on an out-of-the-way Otherside farm had decided to explore the luring mysteries of Central City's nightlife …. He had never before seen his father quite that furious.

Zero's amused voice drew him back into the present. "You better get used to it, boy, speculations about who is doing whom are a staple of palace life. Be glad you're considered in terms of marriage prospect and not just a temporary stud."

 _Not helpful. But that was never the intention, was it?_ The young captain of the Royal Guard cleared his throat.

"Nice try. Checking out the draft areas will be easy enough," he ignored the icy glares suddenly leveled in his direction, "but if there was an actual point in this whole _politics_ spiel, I need a name."

The Longcoat captain was still glaring frostily, while his general's cold smirk wasn't any more accommodating. "Sorry, boy, I'm out of free gifts for today. Everything else is up for negotiation."

"Then you better start negotiating, General! I may be _inexperienced_ ," Jeb matched the smirk tooth for tooth, "but I'm not stupid. To aid an outlaw is to put yourself outside the law, too. At the level you implied a minute ago, we're talking treason, and if that's true – which remains to be seen! – it needs to be stopped or we'll have a civil war on our hands pretty soon. Which you don't want either – or _you would have started one_ , already."

"So?" Zero shrugged unconcernedly, before his smirk turned mocking again. "You shouldn't do that, boy, first declare yourself _'not stupid'_ , and then insist on negotiations when you are in no position to make demands. It disproves the first statement."

The young captain of the Royal Guard mirrored the mockery, too." You so sure? After all, you want _me_ , of all people, to support a proposition _you_ have come up with."

Two pairs of eyes regarded him sharply, assessingly.

"And you think that your opinion on the matter is of any importance?" The young engineer sounded skeptical, very skeptical, but with an undertone of shared frustration, not derision.

Jeb shrugged.

"Area of expertise. If you tell him," a negligent wave indicated the Longcoat general, " _with all due respect, sir, but that tik-tok thing here is going to blow up in your fac_ e, he at least is smart enough to listen to you. If I say, _with all due respect, Your Majesty, but that Longcoat thing here is going to blow up in your face_ , I get listened to, too."

Zero gave him a long, appraising look.

"You drive a hard bargain." The older man sounded almost approving.

Jeb bared his teeth in a grin, of sorts. "You have only yourself to blame for that."

Of course, he could haggle like nobody's business, he was his mother's son, and a displaced single mom trying to feed a growing lad had to be extremely shrewd – or willing. And his mother had NOT been the latter.

The Longcoat general seemed to take that as a compliment, judging by the resultant smirk. Or maybe that was working up for the air of great obligingness when he finally gave in.

"I wouldn't change my horse at Ravren Hall, if I were you," Zero advised. "No matter how convenient it might lie."

More he wouldn't say.

Oh well, at least Jeb got a horse out of the bargain, too.

Oo oo oo oo oO

On the way up, the young captain of the Royal Guard considered the hint he had been given.

Lord Ravren. Not a name he would have expected, the man had never actively opposed his presence, even if he was always irritatingly condescending – of the _'impressive trick you've got there, for a kid your age, but now shoo, the grown-ups have work to do'_ kind. But then, his lordship had gotten out of the Sorceress' reign with his lands intact, he had to have his politicking down pat.

The former rebel leader grinned wolfishly to himself. He was _so_ going to enjoy his next meeting with the patronizing nobleman.

Oo oo oo oo oO

Topside, Sergent Heawl was waiting just beyond the main gate of the mine, with a saddled horse he relinquished to Jeb with barely a nod of greeting.

The big man kept around, however, regarding the young captain of the Royal Guard silently but guardedly while the latter checked through the gear out of habit, and stayed a faithful shadow while Jeb led the horse down the ancient road towards the edge of the encampment.

The young captain had barely made it a dozen steps past that, though, when a familiar stocky figure stepped into his path.

"And just where do you think you are going, Graham?"

 _Bookends, huh?_ Major Anjil had used that selfsame tone of razor-sharp silk when he had first addressed the suspect young man forced on him by his general, perhaps it was only fitting that their last conversation – at least in the foreseeable future – would start in the same vein.

"General's orders," Jeb gave back curtly. "You want to know more, I propose you take it up with him. Sir."

"Don't try to bullshit me, boy," Anjil returned unimpressedly. "You used that excuse once already tonight, it won't work twice."

Just for the hell of it, the young captain gave the short scout leader a look of wide-eyed, wounded innocence. "Ask the sergeant, if you don't believe me, sir. He prepared the horse."

"That's true, sir," the huge non-com supplied without prompting. "The general himself gave the order to have a good horse ready for the boy."

"A _good_ horse?" Anjil repeated with a grin that would have done a shark proud. "Now what would you need that for, huh, Graham?"

"Not for me to say, sir." Jeb gave the cinch a last tug and swung into the saddle.

Twelve hundred pounds of horseflesh wouldn't stop a blade aimed by a man who undoubtedly knew how to fight mounted men, but they always added a certain convincibility to one's willingness to move out. Plus, the extra height gave the young captain the opportunity to check for lurking scouts hidden behind the closest bunch of bushes.

None were visible – beyond the usual lookouts, and those had, naturally, their backs towards him.

Of course, if the scarred major seriously meant to throw him a farewell party after all, that half a hundred or so Longcoats _behind_ Jeb were probably more of a problem.

The stocky scout leader kept his vaguely threatening stance for another few tense seconds, before nodding approval to the young captain's unyielding refusal to explain. "You sure, you know what you are doing, boy?"

 _You bet I do._ Jeb nodded with conviction, and Anjil stepped aside a moment later, seemingly satisfied with what he had read in the younger man's eyes. "Good enough for me."

No fool, the young captain of the Royal Guard urged his horse forward, eager to be gone while the going was good.

Oo oo oo oo oO

He had almost reached the old landslide before some indefinable urge made him look back. There were no detectable signs of pursuit – nor any other indication of the Longcoat army that had fought a pitched battle all day just yesterday, unless one knew to look for fresh disturbances in the field of scree above the tree line.

Jeb shook his head, struck by a strong sense of unreality. If not for the solid evidence of black leather covering his arms, the last three days might have been nothing but a really, _really_ weird dream. He shook his head once more.

Then he turned his mount downhill again and rode off into the first rays of the new dawn.


End file.
